Lets talk about the weather
Trip Start
Nov 17, 2007
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20
29
Trip End
Feb 28, 2008
Hanoi,
Vietnam
Friday, February 1, 2008
I strike up a pleasant conversation with Hang, a local who has arrived to be with her family for Tet, the Vietnamese equivalent of Chinese New Year. I'm so heartened by meeting such a friendly local barely off the plane, that I don't see coming the ripoff travel agent/hotel that I am dropped off at. It's my own fault for not checking with another agent for the price, but I am fleeced twice the face value for my train ticket south, and heavily overcharged for a trip to Ha Long bay. For penance I write out 100 times "Always, when you're travelling in this part of the world, get 3 quotes for your next onward journey".
Hanoi's streets flow with an overwhelming number of scooters and motorcycles and hardly a car in sight. It's noisy, it's incredible, and it takes a while to work out how to cross the street when nobody stops for you - I cheat and walk behind a local. There's a number of sights you can see in just one day; Hi Chi Minh's embalmed body is kept in a massive mausoleum next to his residence when he was alive - though I arrived too late to go inside and see the body. The Hanoi Hilton - aka the prison where Vietnam war prisoners were kept, has also been partly preserved, and whilst it concentrates mostly on the prison's use as a torture centre during the French Indochina war, also has a laughably propagandist section on how well the US pilots shot down were treated during their stay.
In hindsight, I should have headed to the city lake next to the massive night market in the evening before, where you can pick up an English speaking guide (usually a tourism student who wants to practice their English) who can take you round on the back of a motorcycle to help make some better sense of it all, and get you to places not in the guide book.
