Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
We had a lovely few days back in Hanoi, enjoying the hustle and bustle of a city again. Hanoi seems to be such a diverse city with the hectic and busy Old Quarter to the quiet wide streets of the French Quarter. Our hostel was almost in the middle of the market in the Old Quarter and it was fun to sit on the steps and watch the world go by. Our journey back from Cat Ba was painless, we just booked one of the bus and boat combination tickets which worked out about the same price as the DIY version, but you didn't have to think about where to go and what bus to get on. As usual, once back in Hanoi, we snubbed all taxis and walked the 3km to our hostel to stretch our legs, a pretty uninspiring and hot walk.
It felt nice to be back in a city, endless possibilities of things to do, sights to see! We spent a lot of our time in Hanoi walking around, doing anything between 6 and 10km a day. The French Quarter was a nice break from the crazy Old Quarter, big old colonial buildings, now fancy shops and restaurants everywhere. We tried to get our fix of culture, but I just don't think we are really 'museum' people - we visited the Women's museum and the Hao Lo prison (dubbed the Hanoi Hilton). The first was ok, but a lot of information to read, which after a hot walk around, got a bit much, although it was interesting to read about the women's role in the different tribes and their involvement in the war. The second was interesting, but very (as you would expect) bias in favour of Vietnam (first it was used to detain Vietnamese prisoners during the French rule, later being used to house American prisoners of war - where they were treated like 'guests' rather than prisoners…apparently).
Another 'sight' on the list was to visit Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum (although we decided to skip out the whole palace complex on account of the ticket price, at least the mausoleum was free), so we got up nice and early for the trek up there, only to find the queue to be at least a kilometre long! The last admittance is quite early and the queue was not moving quickly (I think this was the queue to get into the whole complex), we decided that our trip to Hanoi was not going to be negatively impacted by not seeing Ho Chi Minh's preserved body (seeing as he didn't want a mausoleum in the first place, he didn't want to take up any land that could be useful to the country for farming or industry, instead wanted his ashes to be scattered across the whole country…), so satisfied ourselves with a picture of the front and continued up towards the west lake area for tea and cake. The dog in the café deserves a special mention here - if stood on it's hind legs with front legs above it's head (like a human), it would probably have been 1½ times bigger than James and at least twice as wide…it was a giant. Thankfully for me, although not so sure for the poor dog, it didn't seem willing (or maybe able?) to do so much as lift it's head off the ground for a look around. Still, I didn't want to risk walking straight past it, but James was brave enough to pose for a picture with it. Unfortunately though, the tiny little puppy running around wasn't so brave to come out and play…that would have been quite a funny picture!
A few days into our stay, Ronny and Breno came back to Hanoi before their adventure north into China, so we caught up with them again for an evening of Bia Hoi (local fresh beer that is brewed daily; very tasty if you get the right station. We sampled 2 different lots, one was yummy…the other tasted like an aluminium can - but at around 15p-30p a glass, you can't really complain!). We'd spotted a good looking local restaurant a few nights earlier, but it had been too busy for us to get a seat, so we decided to try it out again. Although this time, the street outside was completely empty - not even a table or a chair! Instead, we were pointed up to a tiny little flat roof space where a few people were eating. Once we'd walked through the kitchen and up a dodgy little set of stairs, careful not to slip on the puddles of grease on the floor, we ducked through a little hatch and nabbed a few seats at the end of the table - careful not to put anything but our feet on the floor and definitely not touching anything around us. It was grim…but the food was amazing! And with a roof top view and good company, what can be better!!
We had booked the night train to Hue, which left us one more free day to roam around. I was keen to go and see the Temple of Literature, which was apparently the first University in the country and is also now a Confucian temple - I think it was this part that intrigued me more, I was interested to see what a Confucian temple was! It was worth the visit, beautiful grounds that are a world away from the loud, busy city outside the walls. We now know what a Confucian temple is as well; a temple dedicated to Confucius - naturally - and it was refreshing to see a temple designed to worship someone other than Buddha (I'm still not sure we're ready for another one of those yet!). Inside the grounds, there are also big stone markers mounted on big stone turtles (one of sacred animals) honouring all of the other Scholars and Laurates from many many moons ago. Anyway, it was a refreshing change to some of the sights we had been seeing.
And that was Hanoi, in a nutshell! It was good fun and we probably could have stayed a bit longer just wandering around and being city-bums, but the beach is beginning to call! Next stop, Hue and the excitement of seeing who we're bunking in with on the train for 13 hours!
- comments