Hanoi

Travel blogging time. Though our trip to Hanoi was broken up into three and a half chunks, we'll talk about it all together for the ease and pleasure of you, dear readers.

Hanoi Part One began on the evening of October 20th, about 6 hours later than intended thanks to flight delays. We were lucky enough to get a call from Jetstar telling us our flight had been delayed 3 hours while we were still at Miss Loi's in Saigon. A three hour delay sucks, but hey - fair warning. We got to have a leisurely lunch with our friend, Mr. Dan Almon(d), who, if he is reading this, has just lost. Anyway, we then went to the airport where we informed of another 2 hour delay. And then the flight was just late in leaving as well. But we made it, then we checked into the Rendezvous Hotel where we had booked two dorm beds only to be told that they had already given away all the dorm beds. Typical. They did, however, offer us a private room at no extra cost. Untypical. So we checked in, had a bowl of street pho (which isn't as good as the stuff in the south, by the way) and went to bed.

The next morning started off well with a huge free breakfast beneath handpainted replica movie posters of any and every film about the Vietnam/American War. Odd decorating tastes, but whatever. We then set off to buy us a train ticket to Sapa, which was accomplished with relative ease. They were, unfortunately, out of soft sleepers but we did manage to snag a hard sleeper, which we had found more than adequate before when we took an overnight train from Saigon to Nha Trang. After booking, we had lunch at the tasty La Place by the permanently closed cathedral, then walked around the city, checking out a temple, a pavilion, and taking a nice stroll around Hoan Kiem Lake, or the Lake of the Returned Sword.

Legend has it that emperor Ly Thai To was given a magical sword to defeat the oppressive Chinese overlords (a phrase, incidentally, which I've been wanting to use for quite some time) and, when he was finished with it, emperor 'To gave the sword back to the gods via a giant tortoise which took it to the depths of the lake. We did the full circuit of the lake, ending at the Ngoc Son Temple where we crossed a very picturesque red bridge to get into the complex. The temple itself was nothing special, but the views were quite nice and the enormous preserved tortoise illustrating the size of the creatures which some people apparently believe are actually myths despite the photographic and physical evidence.

After putting a deposit on our trip to Halong Bay - which is a story for another blog - we boarded our train at a run as we thought it left 10 minutes later than it did, and settled in for the night journey to Sapa - also another story.

Hanoi Part Deux was a quick one, only worth mentioning for two things: the discovery of a delicious (though still not as good as that in Saigon) pho place on Luong Van Cam across from the Lego store and our hostel, which was Hanoi Central Backpackers hostel. It's a nice enough place for a good price ($5/night for a dorm bed) but it was made that much sweeter by the fact that through a mistake in the system, we booked the beds for a mind-bogglingly low 1 cent/person/night. They honored the price in the end and we checked out, then met up with our friend Alun from Saigon and his parents who were in town for the trip to Halong Bay.

Hanoi Part Tres began after arriving back from our Halong Bay trip. We checked back into the Central Backpacker's Hostel (where we had booked another 3 nights at 1 cent), got some more pho, then saw a water puppets show which was good value and fun, though definitely would have benefitted from opera-style super-titles in English as we had absolutely no idea what was going on during the show. We spent the next morning trying to book a bus to Laos. We probably went to about 10 different travel agencies - all claiming to be the real Sinh Cafe - and all of them showed us the same pictures of the same nice bus with full beds and bathrooms, which were key on a 23 hour journey. We booked with the cheapest one then went back to La Place for lunch and old propaganda poster shopping with Alun and his parents after which we bid them goodbye and discussed our plans for the next couple days.

The next morning, we got going relatively early to rent a motorbike, which was more difficult than it should have been. An hour or so later, we were finally in possession of a vehicle and took off, zipping through the calm, peaceful traffic, probably making people angry for driving like those unruly southerners. First stop was the Ho Chi Minh Museum, which was beautifully done and incredibly uninformative. We spent an hour and a half there and the only thing we learned was that he died in 1969 of something that we think may have been stomach cancer. The problem was that the museum was largely just collections of documents and artistic displays with almost no background information. So unless you had years to spare in study of the collective reams of paperwork - or were a Vietnamese citizen or war buff who already had a good idea of who the man was - the museum was pretty much just something to wander aimlessly through, occasionally stopping to gape at the odd photos the Vietnamese tourists were taking, such as the girl who kept posing with various kissy faces in front of the absurdly large fruit bowl.

After checking out the decidedly disappointing and slightly nausea-inducing-pond of the One Pillar Pagoda, we got told off for getting within about 500 meters of Uncle Ho's Mausoleum as you must respect the lines on the ground even though his body (embalmed and displayed against his explicit wishes, I might add) was absent and the mausoleum was closed for maintenance. Having had enough of Vietnam's national hero, Kate finally - after a year and a half of wearing broken glasses with me pestering her for months to get some new ones - decided to get some new glasses. She picked some out at an optometrist who had them ready within an hour and charged about $30 for the frames including the prescription lenses. Having perfect vision (not to mention physique, hair, teeth, mental agility, and, of course, hands) myself, I have no reference on the matter but am told this is an extremely good bargain.

Next stop was lunch at the delicious Koto's, where they take street kids and train them up to speak English, be waiters, and make delicious food like pumpkin soup with yogurt, coriander chicken wraps, grilled vegetable paninis, falafel pitas, and carrot cakes. Mmm. We went back the next day too. We chose Koto's for lunch, however, due to its serendipitous location across the street from the Temple of Literature, one of the oldest sites in Hanoi and the first university of Vietnam, dating back almost until the city's founding 1000 years ago. It was quite a pleasant place to wander through, stopping to stroke the massive stone heads of the tortoises which supported giant stelae inscribed with graduating scholars' names from the past 700 years. We didn't go back the next day, though maybe we should have because when we were at Koto's we saw that the Russian president was in town with his bodyguard, touring the temple whilst we dined.

We did zip over on the motorbike for one last bit of sightseeing at the National Museum, though we only had 25 minutes to race through the grand villa before it closed. Still enough time to marvel at the wonders and work up an appetite, which was quenched - at quite a pretty penny, I might add - at a little seafood restaurant past the French quarter which looked like it would be cheap with plastic servings and the such. The giveaway was that there were no prices on the menu but, having already sat down, we ordered and prayed for the best. The food was delicious and it had this awesome little communist napkin holder, but the bill was about 4 times what we'd hoped it would be. Over dinner, we discussed our next step, then decided to race home to book some flights from Laos down to Kuala Lumpur but AirAsia wouldn't take our booking no matter how many times we tried. We later found out this was actually our bank's fault as they'd for some reason only just realized that we were in Asia and blocked the card for the first time in 14 months of living out here. So strange. It was an extremely frustrating couple hours spent madly clicking and swearing and the night was only salvaged by Arsenal's defeat of West Ham in the 87th minute which we watched at the Hanoi incarnation of Le Pub, a Saigonese stalwart.

The next day was to be our last in Vietnam so what more fitting than to visit the Museum of the Revolution and the Hanoi Hilton prison, right? The Museum of the Revolution followed the same mold as that of Uncle Ho's, though the documents and descriptions were slightly better. It also had the added bonus of having captured military vehicles out front as well as a massive sculpture made from downed US aircraft which was really cool as an art piece but quite disturbing at the same time (especially due to the bloated body of a dead rat at its base!), what with all the propagandistic talk of praising heros for killing American devils and the such. The Vietnamese (government, at least) has absolutely no regrets about the war, which is quite odd coming from an American point of view. Because of this, however, there is no shame about killing or torturing Americans (though they would never admit to torturing, of course) and there is this weird attitude that the atrocities of the war should be celebrated. This was further evidenced at the Hanoi Hilton where you first walk through a long exhibit talking about how awful the prison was when the French ran it against the Vietnamese revolutionaries who heroically bombed hotels and poisoned massive groups of people... and how nice and clean and perfect it was when the Vietnamese took it over to run as a prison camp for American POWs during the war. The problem with all this is that it's obviously slanted to a certain point of view and, while they may even be 100% correct in their information, coming from a Western upbringing which is cynical of government propaganda, it only served to make us doubt everything that was said. Does that kind of blatant propaganda work on anyone, I wonder? Perhaps the Vietnamese government should hire outside PR firms or something to make its propaganda more subtle and insidious, like the US does.

After that, it was time to head home, shower, and prepare for our grueling 23 hour bus ride to Vientiane, the capital of Laos. We got to our travel agent at the appointed time only to be told we were late and rushed onto a minibus to the bus station where we found that we - and everyone else on the minibus who had all booked with different Sinh Cafe wannabes - had been horribly lied to and not only did our bus not have real beds like in the pictures but it also didn't have bathrooms. At this point, we had just been in Vietnam too long to put up with this kind of crap anymore, and we had the advantage of time and a cell phone so we called the travel agent up and yelled at them until they agreed to give us a full refund on the bus. I kind of felt like a wuss of a traveler, but I really don't think I would have minded the bus much at all if it had been accurately sold. As it was, that travel agency will definitely think twice about lying to future tourists as they had to eat about $56 worth of tickets that night.

Thus began Hanoi Part 3.5. We checked back into our trusty Central Backpacker's Hostel and downed some of the nightly free beer, swapping stories with a Brazilian and a couple Germans. Then we debated sucking up the bus ride but, by that point, we were kind of over the hassle of travel - especially because of all the time spent in transit during the gaps between Hanoi Parts One, Deux, and Tres so we just booked a flight to Bangkok and decided to get to the beach...