Before we get on with today’s adventures, let’s fast rewind to yesterday. All started out fine, we boarded the high speed train, we were collected from the station and taken to the airport. At check in we had a problem. Lyn’s middle name was missing it’s last letter. This is something I should have picked up, but I have also found previously that a number of airlines truncate the middle name, so this shouldn’t be an issue. It was! After a few minutes playing on the computer and consulting superiors, we were told it was ok to fly “this time”, but don’t let it happen again! Went through the emigration process and grabbed a snack, we then heard the dreaded “Would Mrs Winch please report to check in”, we thought that the missing letter had caught up with us. There was no one at the gate, so we figured we’d just wait. Ten minutes later we heard the message again. To get to check in we would somehow have to go backwards through emigration and security to get there. I figured a trip to the Air Vietnam lounge would help, we were told to go back to emigration and tell the officer we had been called back to check-in. Miraculously this worked, he just grabbed our passports and told us to see him when we came back. Simple! (assuming we came back, and hadn’t been kicked off the flight) We got to the check in desk expecting the worst, only to find Lyn’s suitcase there! Turns out she had put her dead cell phone in the case a few days ago, which is verboten, and the scanner caught it. Put said cell phone in carry on, back through security, picked up the passports with no problems and sat down only to find the flight had been delayed 40 minutes. We were late getting into the hotel at around 2300 and after a 0500 start that morning we asked our guide if we could start a little later, so it was an 0830 start for the next day.
Now to today.
About 7AM we heard speech coming over a loudspeaker system outside. It was the daily communist propaganda “encouragement” for the citizens.
We met our guide at 0830 for a mornings walk around the old French quarter of Hanoi. Vietnam had been a French colony for may decades, and the underlying architecture reflected this, although many of the buildings have been increased in height width and depth since then.
The traffic here is amazing/disturbing/unbelievable/crazy/ fill your own words. Scooter is King with a scooter to car ratio of 100:1! Rules of the road and common sense do not seem to apply to scooters, they do not believe in one way streets; centre lines on roads appear to be advisory and crossing the road seems to be impossible. However there is a simple rule for pedestrians to cross, walk in a straight line at a slow constant pace. Vehicles WILL stop or go around you. We proved it on many occasions! The situation was made even worse as the city is celebrating the 70th anniversary of release from French rule this week end.
As usual I’ll dump a whole load of pictures below, some won’t have captions as I am beginning to lose track of what is what! I’ll need to piece it all together when we get home.
As you can see in the above shots, side walks (pavements) once the safe zone for pedestrians, are now parking places for scooters!
There was a large lake in the city, with two islands. One of the islands was connected by a bridge and had a temple on it. There are far less temples here than in previous stops, the majority of people here (85%) practice traditional folk/spiritualism.
Above are the two guardians of the temple gate
Walking around the lake we were stopped by a young lady who asked if we could spare 5 minutes of our time to help her. She was a school teacher who was with a group of grade 1 kids who loved “foreigners” and would like to meet us. They practised their English and took some group photos!
After we finished our walk we headed off to a small cafe that is famous for it’s egg coffee. This didn’t really appeal so we settled for coconut coffee, one hot one iced. After a little more walking (we’re glad we got up to a couple of miles a day back home before we left) we met the car and drove to B52 lake. This is a small part of a lake that has been preserved in the city where a B52 crashed in the Vietnam war.
We then drove a little further and discovered another Temple!! These were nowhere near as ornate as previous ones.
To balance things out, below is the Catholic Cathedral modelled on the Notre Dame in Paris
Now it was lunch time, so we headed off to a back street restaurant whose claim to fame was that President Obama ate there. We had a traditional meal of rice noodles,BBQ pork and spring rolls.
Following that it was off to the city prison where revolutionaries from the turn of the 20th century were sent during the uprising with the French. The same prison was later nicknamed the Hanoi Hilton, where American airman were detained during the Vietnam war. Madame Guillotine made her presence known in the original prison.
We did a little more driving around the city, they too have a market built on the rail tracks, but nowhere as near impressive as the one in Thailand.
We rounded off the afternoon with a local craft beer and snacks
We could have sat all day on the street corner watching the sights and the traffic.
That’s our day in the busy city, tomorrow we are off to Hoi An which should be a lot quieter.