Hanoi, Vietnam

We flew up from Siem Reap to Hanoi yesterday evening. It’s a short flight, about an hour and a half, so nice and easy. Unlike everywhere else to date, Vietnam insisted on a visa application in advance, so we had our visas already stamped in our passports by their London embassy before we left Ireland. The nice thing about that was a very speedy entry process on arrival.

Leaving the airport terminal felt a bit like being in Boston airport, or San Francisco. Remarkably so. This is not Pakse! Hanoi is big – population officially around 9 million but our guide told us it’s more like 12 million when those who haven’t officially registered as living here are included.

The other thing we noticed on arrival was a change in weather. Up to now, we’ve had mid 30s temperatures and constant sunshine. The only real change to date was a noticeable increase in humidity in Cambodia compared to Laos or Thailand. It was much more sticky and muggy there. But a big change here – it’s cloudy, and with temperatures in the low twenties, and much less humidity also.

Perfect sightseeing weather, in fact!

To get us set up for the day, we had a nice breakfast at our hotel, the Hotel de l’Opera. As the name suggests, the hotel is close to the opera house (which is a very grand building indeed), in the French quarter of the city. This part of the city is very reminiscent of Paris, with long straight tree-lined boulevards and very Parisian architecture (Hanoi was the capital of French Indochina and they certainly left a mark here). Our hotel is a very pleasant boutique city hotel, fitted inside one of these old buildings, with the floors sweeping around a lovely central atrium. Breakfast is served on the ground floor of the atrium itself:

After breakfast, we met up with our guide for the day, at the leisurely hour of 9.30am.

First stop on our city tour was the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum. It’s fair to say that Ho Chi Minh is still very much revered here. He was truly the father of the nation. He led the fight to gain independence from the French in the 1940s, and then the fight against the US to achieve reunification of the north and south to form modern Vietnam.

He was an old style communist in the fashion of Lenin and co, and he fashioned the nation in this image. That communist legacy is still very much in evidence (there’s a much more visible government/police/army presence everywhere here than in Laos), but the modern brand of communism seems to have embraced capitalism with gusto, so there’s a great commercial vibrancy to the city.

He had asked that he be cremated when he died. But they ignored that, and built a Soviet-style mausoleum where people could come to see his embalmed body. We took a photo outside it. We didn’t join the queue to go in. Mainly because we didn’t really want to go see him. But also, the queue went on, and on…

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…and on…(way past this corner and on around):

Afterwards, we headed to the ethnicity museum, a very interesting collection of artefacts from the 54 different ethnic groups that make up Vietnam. There is one dominant group, the Viet, who comprise 88% of the population. Most of the other 53 groups are small isolated hill tribes. The museum also contained a garden with reconstructions of the traditional houses of many of the different groups. These ranged from mud huts, to bamboo houses, to wooden houses on stilts, and various others. Exploring these was a big hit with The Boy.

After lunch, our guide took us on a walk around the old town. I had been looking forward to this – lots of narrow streets, food stalls everywhere, and generally agreeable chaos. The reality was somewhat disappointing. Unlike medieval towns in Europe, or the souk at Marrakech, this had no real charm. The girls were a bit frightened by it, because of all the mopeds zipping up and down and constantly beeping for you to get out of the way.