Hanoi - The crazy city

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Day 19 - Friday 5th November - Bangkok to Hanoi
We sleep really well and we are ready to catch the shuttle bus to the airport for our flight to Hanoi, Vietnam. We decide to leave reasonably early so that we can go to the Priority Pass lounge and get some food for breakfast and a cup of coffee before our flight. The bus drops us off and leaves, but then Stuart realises that he has left his GPS unit on the bus! So we then have a mad panic to try and contact the hotel to ask them to check the bus and bring the GPS unit back to the airport. GPS unit retreived, and we can at last have a cup of tea before boarding the plane.
Stacey was absolutely right. This city is crazy! But I absolutely love Hanoi! It’s a wonderful, atmospheric place and for the first time I feel like I am in the real Asia. The ladies look stunning in their traditional clothing, there are ladies carrying yolks with baskets full of stuff and people wearing sampan hats everywhere! It’s very evocative. Ms Keung meets us at the hotel - she is a charming lady - and without too much resistance charms us out of £100 each to take a two night cruise in Halong Bay. She tries her best to sell us a tour of Sapa where we could walk through terraced rice padi fields, but we put up stiff resistance! We wander down to the lake and find a very French colonial place overlooking the lake to eat dinner. Very romantic! Shame Stuart doesn’t feel the vibe too!
We wander around to the “Theatre de Marionettes sur l’eau”. Huge tour buses are arriving and depositing holiday makers here for the show so we decide to buy tickets and see what it is. A ticket costs 40,000 dong (about £1.50 as far as I can make out) and we go into a wonderful little theatre where the stage appears to be water. The puppets are made to almost dance on the water as they tell little stories about life in the rice padi fields, accompanied by a band playing traditional Vietnamise music with a bit of wailing thrown in for good measure. Can’t wait for tomorrow to see the rest of Hanoi.

Day 20 - Saturday 6th November

We sleep remarkably well - Hanoi seems to shut down by 11pm and doesn’t start reawakening until about 6am - so the hotel is incredibly quiet. We are up bright and early and decide to walk the city and see the sights. It’s a beautiful day - quite hot - even though it is technically Vietnamise winter, it’s about 30 degrees C!

We manage to find the Ho Chi Minh Museum and Mausoleum. After having our bags etc screened several times by many people in uniform, we walk towards the Mausoleum. Firstly we get told off for walking inside a yellow line on the pavement - we have no idea why!- then we get told off for walking around the monument in the wrong direction! - all very strange. But we are in a communist country where there are very strange rules for everything.

The Ho Chi Minh museum was more like an art gallery dedicated to communism and facism using alot of symbolism to represent the thinking of the leader Ho Chi Minh. It was very strange and slightly eerie! There are many “old soldiers” dressed in their uniforms with their medals on show.

Then we walk on past a large statue of Lenin, a huge war museum with old war planes and tanks in the grounds, then past the huge Ministry of Defence guarded by scruffy looking soldiers with their hands in their pockets and big guns, all of whom who looked about 12! Eventually we walked back into the old quarter and found the market. As with everything here is it complete madness. You can buy absolutely anything you need here - there are live fish in buckets, strange looking vegetables, mountains of dried funghi and hooky iphones to name but a few!

We decide to treat ourselves to a posh meal in a very expensive looking restaurant by the lake. As we are splashing out, Stuart orders a bottle of French wine - when we taste it however, it is definitely corked and we then have to explain to the waiter that we can’t drink it. I am really not sure that he understands why we have sent the wine back! There are some very strange things on the menu including frog, turtle and shark’s fin! No dog though so we are OK. But we just order a chicken dish and a beef dish accompanied by rice and noodles. The chicken was so hot that after the first mouthful I could hardly speak! From then on it was a very quiet evening!

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