Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
So the bus journey from Vientiane to Hanoi is cheap but there is a reason why. It's pretty hellish although valium got me through most of it sleeping pretty much all the way to the border. When we got off the bus I hadn't quite prepared for the Vietnamese weather and how cold it would be but as my bag was locked away under the bus I had to spend the 2 and the half hours at the border freezing cold in shorts and flip-flops. I got a taste of Vietnam when I asked for the toilet and ended up walking into the wrong (filthy) room where two guys had tied a pig to a pole to be put to the slaughter! haha, lovely! Saw the poor little dogs soon to be food all crammed into cages on the back of a truck which was pretty shocking but no surprise.
29 hours after leaving I finally arrived in Hanoi, still freezing cold, and at 10pm was finally in the right hotel that I had booked and not in the ones that various people tried taking me to! First impressions of Vietnam were not great but it all changed when I woke the next day and went for a walk around the city. It is total madness there and crossing a road is an artform. Traffic wont stop for you so you just have to slowly walk out into the road and be assured that all the traffic WILL swerve around you. The roads are so chaotic but it does seem to work and it kind of has to in a city of 4 million people and more than 2 million motorbikes!
Unbelievably I had to do some winter shopping for my time there and each item is sold on a different street with each street apparently named after what it sells, so one street sells shoes, another glasses, another tacky Tet (Vietnamese New Year) decorations and so on. Speaking of which at Tet it is good luck to have an orange tree in your home so during the build up to New Year when I was there, loads of the bikes had orange trees tied onto the back which adds to the madness. Bumped straight into Lucy and Rhys from Vang Vieng and was good to see some familiar faces so spent some time with them before their flight to Saigon.
It is a city I think you either love or hate and I totally loved it and thought it was great fun and for the culture-vultures there is plenty to see including the legend in Vietnam that is Ho Chi Minh lying embalmed in his Mausoleum. After my trip to Halong Bay (separate blog) I decided to take in a couple of hours of sights on my last day. I overslept and it was a close call if I would make the mausoleum before it shut at 11am so I told the moto driver to go fast which is maybe not the wisest thing to do in Hanoi but great fun! Just missed out though so didn't get to see Uncle Ho and had to make do with his museum instead which I personally thought was rubbish. I had my photo taken outside the mausoleum just incase I was going to pretend I went there, saw a couple of other sights in the complex and then set off for my next museum. Was a little bit nervous when I found myself being the only one walking down a certain street where all the buildings had armed guards outside and resisted the temptation to take photos incase they opened fire.
Temple of Literature was next which was a peaceful little place in the middle of the city and the walls around the garden were like a barrier to the chaos on the other side. Outside I was easily persuaded to hire a guide for the day and my planned couple of hours soon turned into a 6 hour tour of the city. Went to the History Museum which had some cool ancient artifacts and then to the Prison Museum where some of the captured US soldiers were kept. That was fascinating there and the conditions that prisoners were kept in and the torture methods that had been used were outrageous.
The best museum was the Museum of Ethnology which was amazing and pretty newly built in a very modern looking building. Inside was loads about all the minority tribes around Vietnam and typical scenes from the villages had been set up and the way some of these people still live and the methods they use was so interesting. Outside they had built some of the buildings of the various tribes and had really put in loads of detail. The funniest and most bizarre was a tomb they had built which is surrounded by some pretty pornographic statues as you will see in the pictures and it sent a tour group of old American women into a very excited frenzy!
On the trip back to the guesthouse I stopped at the point that John McCain (current presidential candidate) was captured when his plane was shot down during the war and visited the oldest pagoda in the city. Had to finish Hanoi off with another meal in an amazing little restaurant I found close to my guesthouse called Ladybird and then it was off to the train station for a night train south and hopefully some warmer weather that wasn't like being back in the UK!
But anyone that wants to see a great city, go to Hanoi because I think it's brilliant and totally unlike any of the other cities I have been to in Asia. The food is really good as well which helps and if you want to get drunk for under a fiver then $10 can buy you about 70 beers there called Bia Hoi!
- comments