Minor Hanoi-ances

Hanoi has been a good destination, and a good choice for New Year - October 2010 is the city's 1000th "birthday" (since it first became the capital city, I think, notwithstanding that it hasn't held that status continuously), and they're kicking off the celebrations for New Year (even though it's not Tet, the Vietnamese new year, for a few weeks - as with Christmas, they're not averse to adopting a Western holiday for celebratory purposes).

In retrospect, the best thing about Ho Chi Minh City is that it was great preparation for Hanoi, which feels sane by comparison. If you turned up here as your entry point to Vietnam, the traffic and people's desire to sell to you or taxi you around might drive you a touch mad. After HCMC, it's easy.

 

Guess whose right of way it is? (they nominally drive on the right)

 

A rare bit of peace and quiet - early hours of New Year's Day

Much of the city is easy to navigate around - there's a scenic lake, and immediately north of that is the old town. In years past, almost every street used to specialise in one craft or another, and this is still true to some extent - there are streets with lots of neighbouring shops selling silk, or brass, or silver, or sweets (Lilly missed this one), or sunglasses (!); or wholesaling (I tried to buy a pair of gloves for colder destinations ahead from a guy who told me he only sold them in tens). And a big, crazy market at the top, which flows out along the length of a rather long street on weekend evenings.

 

I love these crazy pipes sprouting from the roads and pavements all over the place.

We spent 2 nights here before heading to Halong Bay, and had a quick scout around for good hotels too - so we were able to find a really nice but still cheap one for four more nights (and they gave us a free upgrade), with a computer in every room - this plus some free time means I've finally caught up on photos for our last few destinations.

The main attraction here is a complex dedicated to Ho Chi Minh, including Uncle Ho's preserved remains in a big, gray mausoleum. Having ticked off Lenin a few years ago I was pleased to get #2 on my list of preserved leaders (hopefully with #3 to follow in China).

 

Tourist tips - Ho is only seeing visitors in the morning from 8-11ish, and during this time you can only get into the compound from the SW corner, which is very annoying when you approach from the NE, you get 30 yards from the mausoleum across a grassy area and there are no signs warning you that you face a long walk round.  Just lots of whistling guards. The palace grounds and museum then close for a very long lunch break, so try to come early and see all 3 things before lunch, as we failed to do.

From there you can go and look at the outside of his old palace (which like many royal buildings here is an ugly shade of yellow-brown, which stands for earth, the central of the 5 elements here), three of his cars, and the little house-on-stilts in the grounds that he later moved into.

 

And then there's the Ho Chi Minh Museum (above), which is crazy. It's full of displays and sculptures which represent part of Ho's life. Every single one of them is nuts. For example, the cave where Ho spent time thinking is "presented here in the form of the human brain" (it is very big but looks nothing like either a cave or a brain) and several of Picasso's works are presented as symbols of anti-facism (slightly tenuous relevance). One room has a strange glass-and-mirrors tower and a video apparently about spaceflight which segues from men on the moon to a rocket with a big red star to a shuttle launch which, I realised as my bad-taste-ometer went off, is Challenger launching and then exploding.

I don't think we learned a single thing about the history of Ho or Vietnam. It is my favourite historical museum ever and I highly recommend it. (For exactly the same reasons Lilly was less impressed!)

 

 

 

 

 

We also visited Hoa Lo prison, aka the Hanoi Hilton (not to be confused with the actual Hilton here), which has mostly been converted into a hotel and shopping mall,* but they've preserved a bit. If you've ever wondered what a prison cell or a mannequin in ankle restraints looks like, you may find this fascinating (most of the exhibit is about the prison during their fracas with the French). The only bit I found interesting is the section given over to the US airmen who were held here, and that only because of the propaganda exercise. The first room shows a selection of buildings destroyed and people killed or injured by US bombing (which have no direct relation to the prison). The second is a collection of photos showing what a great time the pilots had while they were held there - making their Christmas dinner, playing volleyball, chess tournaments... Real holiday camp stuff, it looks like a great place to be.

* Current scene of a shop which, according to Lilly's extensive internet research, sells probably genuine North Face coats for very little money as they're made in Vietnam and have tiny defects. There is no evidence that the US pilots were forced to stand in a pile 'em high clothes shop and watch their wives try on a variety of coats - but then, that's not the sort of party-approved image you'd expect to see...

 

Mural at the prison

We also went to the Army museum (the people's army has just celebrated its 65th birthday). Again, if you've ever wondered what a gun or barbed wire looks like, this is fascinating. On the bright side, they do have lots of tanks, planes etc and a great sculpture - or possibly junkpile - made of parts. (Lilly also spotted a cat sitting on it, which made it Even Better.)

 

The other display I enjoyed here was various pieces of relatively modern art about both modern Vietnam and the war. This prompted us to head down the road to the Fine Arts Museum, which also has some interesting stuff, including some etched into lacquerwork*, which I haven't seen the like of elsewhere.

* Lacquerwork is a bit of a Vietnamese specialty. Lilly didn't buy any - I shouldn't be surprised, lacquer shopping activity is not normally a complaint you can level at her.

For our last day we took a day trip to the Perfume Pagoda. I can't really recommend this, though if you have time to kill and a nice day it would be fine, but it's by a distance the most expensive day trip we've done here and probably the least impressive (if rain is forecast, don't even think about going). It involves a 2-hour drive (plus the usual hour driving around central Hanoi picking people up from other hotels, since we always seemed to be first on the route both before and after we swapped hotels!), then an hour's boat ride which is made to sound like an attraction. The good thing is that the scenery is pretty nice - lots of karst limestone hills on either side of a wide, clean-ish river.

Note 'roadsign'!

The bad news is that you are on a tiny wooden bench in a very slow metal rowing-boat propelled by a local villager (who is rowing forwards rather than backwards with some very makeshift oars). I wish somebody had told me to take a cushion! (All Vietnamese seem to possess the ability to crouch with both feet flat on the ground for long periods of time. I guess this is handy if you sit on low benches or use squat toilets. I prefer to do neither given the choice.) You can then walk up a reasonably well-paved path with a lot of steps, or take the cable-car (recommended - we walked back down and you don't miss anything in the cable-car, and walking down is a lot easier than up). At the top is a small descent into a limestone cave with one very impressive limestone column outside and a small altar inside. I'd be more impressed if I weren't just back from Halong Bay. The one interesting thing I did learn is that they have to make sure that all temples, even in caves, cannot face west, as that direction is associated with death - so graveyards are always to the west of villages - and even in cities, west-facing houses are very difficult to sell and can be rented by foreigners, who don't care about such things, for knock-down prices.

Every year for a few weeks starting around Tet, many thousands of Buddhists come here every day, which makes it a bad time for tourists to visit - glad we missed that at least. There's another, more traditional pagoda at the bottom of the hill, which is nothing to write home about, so I won't. (And a further 12 in the area if you have a few days to spend.) After which, fortify your bum for another hour in the boat and expect the rower to complain about his tip. The first rower to show enough initiative to bring cushions actually deserves one!

If I sound a touch down on a couple of things we've done, don't read too much into it. Hanoi has been good fun, it has plenty of good places to eat and drink. It's a touch more expensive than the rest of Vietnam but we've rarely been let down, especially by the cheap eats (one of the tastiest meals I had was also one of the cheapest, in a hostel cafe next to the water puppet theatre*). Although I'm glad I'm not French, or I'd be very worried about seeing "chien" on menus everywhere (it means vegetables - our friends Marc and Nickie did however wander into a quiet square one day and see a dog being shaved and prepared for cooking, but fortunately the closest we saw to this was 3 pig carcasses being carried on the back of a motorbike**).

* Don't ask. We saw a clip of this on a local TV channel and did not feel any need to go to the real thing! I suspect it's unique to Vietnam for a reason.
** Other things spotted being carried on a motorbike (some of these spotted by other tourists we met): up to 5 people, a tray with dinner and two drinks, an 8-foot tree trunk (dragged behind), and a 5-foot fully-decorated Christmas tree.

It's a great base for trips to Halong Bay (and Sapa, a trip to mountain villages that we were short of time and in the wrong season for) and a good place for a few days' stay in its own right. One last tip - get rid of local currency before leaving, there's nowhere to exchange in the airport (at least after security) and other countries don't want them! Anyone interested in GBP10-worth of Dong...?