After a week in Laos, and Halong Bay's serene scenery and tranquil cruising (albeit with hundreds of other tourist boats), the bustle of Vietnam's capital came as quite a shock! We disembarked our Halong Bay junk at 8am on Monday the 25th, and, after a short stop at a handicrafts centre (lovely lacquerwork, but very pricey), arrived in Hanoi at about 12.30 in the afternoon....our first impression was 'Oh God, this traffic is mad!'. The city's wide boulevards, and the hundreds of narrow side-streets and alleys of the Old Quarter, simply swarm with motorbikes, many bearing entire families - mum, dad, toddler and baby. The 'Honda' (generic for motorbike) is the chief form of personal transport in Vietnam, and the capital is certainly the place to appreciate the scale of bike ownership!
After dumping our bags at the hotel, located about a half-hour walk from the centre, the whole group took an orientation stroll into town, with lunch along the way. Brian, our leader, explained and demonstrated how best to cross a Hanoi road in the face of mass oncoming motorbike traffic... just walk slowly and steadily, and the bikes will miraculously swerve around you. Simply have faith in this. If you try to wait for a gap in the traffic, you'll wait forever!
We explored the many side-streets of the Old/French Quarter, each known for selling a particular product. So there's shoe street (shoe shops only), art street, fabric street and even motorbike saddle street. After a visit to the famous Fanny ice-cream parlour, we continued on around the central Hoan Khiem lake, where we saw a massive turtle breaking the surface! Hoan Khiem is legendary for its large turtles but they are very seldom spotted. After further exploration of the French Quarter with its quaint colonial apartment buildings and back-street markets, it was back to the hotel and out for an Indian curry - a nice change from noodles and fried rice.
We started Wednesday with a hearty breakfast at KOTO (Know One, Teach One), a restaurant where street children are trained in catering and hospitality - a good cause and excellent food. Then it was off to the imposing granite mausoleum where the enbalmed body of Ho Chi Minh (or Uncle Ho, as the Vietnamese call him) lies in state. Like the Mao mausoleum in Beijing, we found the experience rather bizarre... queuing up with hundreds of locals to file past the waxen remains of a revered national leader. At least Uncle Ho looked better preserved than Mao!
We wandered through the surrounding presidential compound, including Uncle Ho's humble wooden house on stilts (he apparently refused to live in the grand French colonial governor's residence next door). In the afternoon, a few of us visited the Temple of Literature. This tranquil complex of courtyards and small shrines set among shady trees is the site of Vietnam's first university, founded in the 12th century. Massive stone stelae, with beautifully sculpted turtles at their bases, bear the names of all the students who graduated there. Later in the afternoon, Rich visited the infamous 'Hanoi Hilton', a former prison used by the French (to imprison Vietnamese dissenters) and later the North Vietnamese (to imprison American POWs), and now a museum. I took another stroll through the back-streets with a few of the girls, and we all met up for cocktails at sunset.
In the evening the whole group met up for a traditional water puppet show... what a delight! Try to visualise this: simple scenes are acted out on the surface of an on-stage pond by marionets mounted on (and controlled via) long rods below the water surface... all to the sounds of rather pleasant traditional singing and music. Quite enjoyable.
On Thursday we had a day free before boarding the night train to Hue at 6pm. So Rich and I hopped onto motorbike taxis to go to the History Museum. This was the first time we actually took part in Hanoi's crazy traffic... how sensible and almost orderly it seems when you're on a bike and not a pedestrian! Before visiting the Museum's fascinating archeological displays, we feasted on a brunch of spring rolls and meatball soup with noodles, served up by a street vendor who ushered us into her front room!
In the afternoon we wandered along to West Lake - the day was hot and we were getting a bit sick and tired of the frantic traffic, so went in search of a little greenery. Unfortunately the massive expanse of water did not have much by way of surrounding parkland. By the time we boarded the train in the evening, we were ready to leave Hanoi... we had fun, but three days were quite enough!
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