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Published: August 9th 2007
Sapa was an excellent relaxed start to Vietnam but it was time to see where people made and spent their dong in the north - Hanoi.
The 10 hour train ride down was interesting for 2 reasons. One was to see the mountains give way to bright green flat rice fields and increasingly large Vietnamese towns and cities (they gotta put the 80 million conical hat wearing population somewhere), the other was the dude sitting opposite us on the train. Chris was a 56 year old American who had been traveling continously for the last 6 years throughout India and SE Asia and had the thickest stamp-filled passport we had ever seen. A true ramblin' man! Over the course of the train trip he told me the entire history of the world in the 20th century and also how to get 30 percent more from your already dirt cheap train coffee (insist they fill the cup up until it overflows onto the plastic table while the whole train watches). He knew how to do it all on the cheap! Guess you have to if you are traveling for that long...
Got into Hanoi amid a torrential downpour, crashed and
Ho Chi's Mausoleum
The little fella's buried here...then spent the next few days working out how to roll with the city. Hanoi as a city has a lot of cool stuff to see, but the first thing you've got to do is negotiate the millions of motorbikes that fill both the tiny streets in the old quarter and the large boulevards that make up the rest of the city. If you are alert and walk at a steady pace, the bikes will flow around you in an 'organised chaos' kind of way, but daydream for a second and trouble will find you! That was unfortunately just what happened to Kako, who stepped out at the wrong time and got brushed (hard) by a bike. The dickhead then just sped off and I was left to help Kako, her ripped skirt and her bruised legs, back to the hotel. Luckily nothing was broken (Kako was shaken up more than anything) but at least we now know what to expect when we move to Ho Chi Minh city in the south after the trip. Just hope it doesn't happen again!
Once Kako had recovered we were both determined to see the beauty within Hanoi and not leave feeling
Roasted!
Chris n Kako and a touch of salt... angry. Walking along the wide tree lined boulevards checking out the many colonial buildings left over by the French (who gave up on 'Nam in 1954) makes for an interesting day out, as does sitting on one of the many BIA HOI corners downing 20c draught beers until they boot you out @ midnite! If there is only one word to remember in Vietnamese it's Bia Hoi! Its cheaper than water (no joke) and is a great way to sit down and just watch Hanoi being Hanoi.
Pickled corpses sound interesting? It did to us, so we also spent a morning waiting with the masses for a fleeting glipse of Ho Chi Minh's preserved dead body. His body is housed in a huge grey mausoleum, and the temperature is kept at a cool 18 degrees to ensure he doesn't go off! The man is revered like a god in the north for leading the independence fight against the French (who left in '54) and later the Americans, and for Vietnamese who can afford it, is considered essential viewing. He's a lot smaller than we imagined (he couldn't have been more than five feet tall) and the funny thing is
that his death wish was to be cremated. But like Lenin and Mao Zedong, all 'successful' communist leaders have gotta be pickled!
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