Beep, Beep in Hanoi!


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Asia » Vietnam » Red River Delta » Hanoi
December 1st 2010
Published: December 1st 2010
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We arrived in Hanoi late afternoon on the Sunday and as we drove from the airport to the Old Quarter, the first thing that hit us was that it was so much busier than Ho Chi Minh City. The Old Quarter (where our hotel was located) was swarmed with a mass of motorcycles that tangled through the narrow streets. It is a city designed for half a million people, yet six million people live here. People are everywhere from locals selling anything to make a living, to plenty of tourists. Hanoi has it all from the ancient history to a modern look and feel. It is one amazing city.

After checking into our Serenade hotel, our first thing we did was went and got some lunch. We dined at the amazing ‘Five’ restaurant that was expensive for Vietnam, yet inexpensive for us. We sat here for a while watching the daily life that unfolded in front of us. From the ‘beep, beep’ of motorcycles zooming by, to the cyclo riders and the tourist sitting in them, and the street sellers with huge baskets full of bananas and pineapples sitting on their shoulders.

Hanoi, being the capital city, has everything to offer. One thing as a tourist that you must do here is go and see a Water Puppet performance. We went to the Thang Long Water Puppet Theatre for 60,000 dong each and witnessed a play of puppets in water performing traditional music, song and dance in many unique characters. The stage was a large container of water and the puppets were carved wooden puppets. It was amazing!

We lived in Hanoi for four days and spent that time exploring all different parts of the city. One of the days we explored the Old Quarter by foot. We had our maps and as we commenced our walking tour it was quite easy to navigate around to all the sights, however, it got progressively more challenging as the day went on, due to the busy, narrow streets and the street signs not matching up with our map. We made it through the entire Old Quarter in a good four hours. Some of the key sights we saw included: Ngoc Son Temple, Red Huc Bridge, Martyrs Monument, Memorial House, Bach Ma Temple, Cua A Quan Chuong and St Joseph Cathedral. We ended our long day of walking at the ‘Legend Bar’, which is a massive four storey bar/ café in the middle of the Old Quarter that over looks the centre of this area. In the evening we went to this amazing restaurant that I would highly recommend. It was called ‘Lady Bird’ and we ate like Kings and Queens here. For only US$15 we ate and drank three entrees, two mains, two desserts, four beers and two cocktails! We ended our night drinking more 10 cent beers on our hotel rooftop. Ah, bliss!

The next day we started early at 7.30am as we had a lot more sights to cover. We took a taxi to the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum Complex to discover the main sights of Hanoi. This included Ho Chi Minh’s Museum, which is dedicated to preserving everything memorable related to the great revolutionist, Ho Chi Minh. The five floors were quite extensive and impressive. Our next stop was Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum, a large memorial to the Vietnamese leader in Hanoi, before visiting Ho Chi Minh’s stilt house and Presidential Palace.

Afterwards we headed for some delicious lunch at a place called Koto. Koto is a restaurant and project that provides career training and guidance to disadvantaged kids. We ate a variety of food including Vietnamese spring rolls, pork wontons, fish and chips and drank mocktails. Across the road from the restaurant was the Temple of Literature, which is a temple of Confucius in Vietnam and also functioned as Vietnam’s first university. This was a very interesting place to wander around. The rest of the afternoon continued with more exploring on foot as we visited the Ambassadors Pagoda and Hao Lo Prison, which is know as the Hanoi Hilton. After a full day of exploring we relaxed in the evening with another beautiful meal and beers on our hotel rooftop.



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3rd December 2010

photo's
Wow these photo's are more amazing than the last lot. It's like reading history thru photo's.

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