In the evening, we took cyclos to the water puppet show.
Our guide had warned us about rogue cyclo drivers and of course I immediately got into the wrong cyclo. She caught up to me in her cyclo and told me to "get out and move to this cyclo." Embarrassed, I did so, leaving the rogue cycle driver to his own devices.
We rode through the crazy traffic, as the motorbikes steered around us. It all seemed a bit deadly but all twelve of us made it safely to the water puppets.
According to my guidebook, the water puppets are a fantastic, exclusively northern Vietnamese folk artform. A small band plays traditional instruments and sings from an elevated (dry) platform. Meanwhile, marionettes are manipulated around in a small, deep pool of water, demonstrating various vignettes from Vietnamese life.
A couple of wooden dragons swam out first, spewing fireworks from their mouths and bobbing around clumsily.
They were followed by farmers driving oxen through rice paddies and various rodents and country scenes, all splashing about in the pool. Two phoenix-birds laid an egg together and hatched a baby phoenix, and then the phoenix-family swam away in domestic bliss.
I looked around, my mouth open with astonishment. This was really weird.
Everyone in the theater was a tourist. It reminded me of watching whirling dervishes in Syria, Amazon tribal dances in Peru, or kabuki theater in Tokyo. The question for all instances is this:
Is this stuff for real??
Surely water-puppetry is a traditional Vietnamese handicraft. But surely they don't do this for fun on a regular day. Surely these performances are purely for the benefit of tourists.
But I am a jaded cynic... it was an interesting and colorful spectacle and while it is unlikely that I will return any time soon to the water puppet theater, I was pleased to see it once.
On our cyclo trip from the theater to the Hoa Sua restaurant, my pal's driver lost a piece of his cycle in the middle of a busy intersection. He jumped off the cyclo and went chasing a chain, leaving my pal's cyclo drifting backwards in the night, right into oncoming motorbikes.
The motorbikes deftly steered around her. She laughed and later told me, "I was staying right there. At least in the cyclo I had some protection." That's a lot braver than I would have been.