One Pillar Pagoda (Chua Mot Cot) Hanoi

Y partimos a Vietnam!...claro que la salida de China tuvo más de algún tropiezo....salimos de Guilin muy temprano, tipo 7am, hacia la estación de trenes. El hostel estaba cerrado y el nochero nos debió abrir la puerta...afortunadamente nuestros amigos taxistas no nos pusieron inconvenientes a la hora de hacerlos parar y llegamos al tren a la hora. …

I can't help but compare Hanoi with Ho Chi Minh City. When doing so Hanoi's superiority as a holiday destination becomes apparent. From the airport to the hotel to the street-scape and astonishing beauty I have fallen in love with Hanoi with certain re-visit in the coming few years.

There is so much character in this city. We had dinner at …

26. janúar til 3. febrúar
Síðustu dagana í Nanning eyddum við á öðru hosteli en við byrjuðum að vera á, hostelið sem við fórum á, Nanning City hostel, var mun betra en það sem við höfðum verið á fyrst í Nanning. Þarna vorum við komin með einka baðherbergi, sjónvarp og við vitum ekki hvað. Hittum Markús frænda á nýja hostelinu. Gátum ekki fengi …

We arrived in Hanoi at 5am, on a crisp, chilly Saturday morning. We walked up to find our hotel and then went off to find some breakfast. We had some pretty average eggs and bread, and decided not to pay the extra dollar for butter!

We wandered up to Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum, and after managing to decipher the over-complicated security …

I've been here in Hanoi for what feels like ages, but it's only been a couple of days. IT IS BOILING HERE! It's the hottest country I've been to so far, between 35 and 40 every day.Thank god the dorm in the hostel has air con. The routine tends to be; get out of bed at 8ish, free breakfast of bread roll and coffee, go explore, come back at 12, nap …

This blog entry basically runs right into the last one. We last left off at the train station in Hanoi station, tired and weary from battling with the less than pleasant Vietnamese family. "Where do you go?" and "Taxi!" were the first things we heard as we left the safety zone of the arrival area. We have heard this many, many times by now and we …

Today, we spent the day touring some sights in the city of Hanoi. We left our hotel at 8:00am and started our day at the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum and Museum. Once we got to the Mausoleum, the regulations were very strict, no hats, no talking, no walking too fast or too slow, there were guards armed with bayonet guns all around the Mausoleum and the …

After the sweltering heat of Cambodia, boy was it nice to get off the plane and find it was a cool 22c in Hanoi at 9.30 pm.

The flight out of Cambodia all went according to plan and we got a bit of dinner on the flight which was only 1 hr 40 mins. On arrival in Hanoi we got through immigration no problem - were glad we had got the Visas …

Today we woke up at around 7 AM. We got ready then left with our guide to go on a city tour for the day in Hanoi. Our first stop was at the Ho Chih Minh Mausoleum. Ho Chih Minh is the man that liberated Vietnam from the French in the war. He is highly respected in Vietnam, and is an amazing inspirational man. At the Mausoleum, we learned about him …

So i woke up nice and early well relatively at 9am and got ready and went down for my free breakfast the normal english breakfast yes i know so unoriginal.

After eating i then decided to go take a walk and went to all the places above.

So as i was looking for directions to the water puppet theatre i ended up getting lins until a …

... of Asian tourists pouring through the place. We then walked around a garden area containing various museums and temples, and visited the One Pillar Pagoda. We also went to the Chinese embassy to pick up our visas..we'll be there in less than a week! ...

... money. There was a woman at the temple who would swap real money for fake.  The gods are easily fooled. The One Pillar Pagoda (Chua Mot Cot) was mildly cool. I like the idea. The structure was built to resemble a lotus blossom emerging from the ...

... I lug it home) a wonderful topic of conversation when sharing memories of our trip. Originally built in 1049, the One-Pillar Pagoda is a wooden structure that sits on stilts over a lake. The original was damaged during the war so the current ...

... today, probably due to a visit to Madame Tussauds. Near by was another few sights I quickly checked out including the one pillar pagoda, famous for its err...one pillar, and the Presidential Palace after ducking away from another army of Moto drivers - ...

... Minh's Mausoleum where the man himself is laid to rest. Not an overly exciting moment, but worth the visit. A visit to the "One Pillar Pagoda" followed, which was amazingly a Pagoda on one pillar! Go figure! We then went to Ho Chi Minh's "House on ...

... to gawp at - now that's respect!     In the same complex as the mausoleum lie the palace, museum and One-pillar Pagoda. We didn't bother with the first two but stopped to take a few pictures of the unique design of the pagoda (PICS). We ...

... and seeing his house, palace, museum, garden fence etc we felt a bit Ho Chi Minhed out and walked up to the One Pillar Pagoda (not terribly exciting) and then to the Temple of Literature. This was lovely and very well kept and was the first university ...

... later became a university (for men only, of course), and is now used for special events and academic gatherings; the One Pillar Pagoda, and the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum complex where Ho Chi Minh's embalmed body is kept despite strict instruction in his ...

... old city, Hanoi has remarkably few sights. In the ‘new’ city, it amounts to the museum (boring), the One Pillar Pagoda (designed to represent a lotus blossom, a symbol of purity, rising from a sea of sorrow), the Presidential Palace (boring) ...

... exhibition was disorganized and there was limited English labeling. As a result, I couldn't learn much from it. The One Pillar Pagoda was a Buddhist structure originally built in the 11th Century. The version I saw today was reconstructed after the ...