After our Halong Bay trip we returned to the hotel we had stayed in before, only to find out they had forgotten to book us in again and were now fully booked. Fortunately the hotel next door had space. We wondered through Hanoi again and went for, what we had been informed was, the best pho (noodle and beef soup/stew) in the city. It was very tasty, as all the food we'd had so far was, but in our books it was still second to the pho in Saigon.

After learning more about the Vietnam history during our stay and also having experienced the woes of the current communist regime, we decided to pay Ho Chi Minh a visit. After our initial failed trip, we were up and out early and we thought we were there in good time, arriving at the mausoleum at 9:30 and the back of the queue at 9:45. We were curious as to whether Ho Chi Minh was always this popular or whether, unbeknown to us it was his Birthday or something. There were hundreds of very young school children there and we couldn't help feel that seeing the embalmed body of an 80 year old man who had been dead for a number of years may be traumatising. We suppose that's how you brainwash a country, get them young. This feeling was reinforced when our hotel receptionist, a girl in her early twenties, earnestly told us how handsome she thought the dead man was.

Greg made friends with a Vietnamese guy via google translate in the queue, he reliably informed us a 1km queue was a normal volume of traffic for a Tuesday morning. It was his third time visiting the corpse of the ex-president! Luckily the queue moved smoothly, especially after the army ensured we were all walking strictly two by two. We were allowed no hats, no cameras, phones or electronics, covered shoulder and knees only, no hands in pockets and we weren't allowed to speak. We had to walk continuously in a circle around the body of Ho Chi Minh in a glass cabinet, if you slowed down, a soldier (with a gun) would push you forwards. Ho Chi Minh was as expected...motionless and pale, dressed in a vietcong army uniform. The event was all over by 10:45. It was then time to head to the airport, we were leaving Vietnam and heading to Laos for a few days. Hanoi was not the highlight of our Vietnam adventure, but everything else we had done had been sensational.