2008-10-05 - Vietnam 4 - Hanoi

Got off the train at Hanoi and, after checking in at the hotel, had most of the day to wander. The main market in the old quarter is impressive, being a 3-story affair; the old quarter itself is interesting with its skinny houses (they were taxed based on street frontage, so blocks are very narrow and very deep), narrow streets with trees, and the lake in the middle.

Hard to see here, but the middle building is a shop selling bamboo furniture, and they are closing up, which involves Mr pulling the stock up to the 4th floor, while, Mrs attaches things to the rope when he lowers it again.

Narrow streets, motos only

Street scene - narrow houses

Street sign - these were everywhere, which helps greatly for the lost tourists

Another skinny street, no cars here

Night markets

Moto cup holder (just tilt the mirror)

Saturday saw another city tour – the temple of literature (a former university), more temples and pagodas, souvenir shops, etc. A mandatory stop was uncle Ho’s mausoleum (currently closed so Uncle Ho can get touched up) and Ho Chi Minh’s house. Another stop was the Vietnamese history museum, which had some interesting tribal huts built in the grounds – some quite impressive structures.

Uncle Ho's mausoleum

Formal approach to the mausoleum - was a hazy day

Up close

Old governor of Indochina's house, where Ho Chi Minh set up shop, only it was too grand, so he moved into a regular-sized house in the grounds instead

Inside the small house

The small house

Wooden stilt house, also in the grounds of the big house, where Uncle Ho also lived for a while - stilt house as that's what the common folk lived in

Stilt house verandah

Underneath the stilt house, where the cabinet met

Even communist guards play with their mobile phones on their lunch breaks

Convention centre or such, with some nice communist-style architecture

In the museum - a fish trap seller wrode this bicycle around for 40 years selling his wares

Recreation of a village commune house from one of the Vietnamese ethnic groups - see tourist for scale - quite impressive

Another commune house, this time long. This is also the place to take wedding pics, which happens around 2 months before the wedding. It was the start of wedding season, so there were a few sets of couples and cameras.

Inside the tall commune house

Good idea

Traffic

Another bonsai at a pagoda on an island on the central in Hanoi

Tree roots

Just inside the university of literature

Roof tile detail

Shrine in one of the temples

The final part of the tour was a water puppet theatre – not really my thing I thought, but turned out to be quite good. It’s like string puppets, except the puppeteers stand in waist-deep water behind a screen, and manipulate the puppets via poles under the water. They re-enacted various traditional Vietnamese scenes, such as fishing, rice planting, and the resurrected sword, where a golden tortoise (which lived in the lake in the middle of Hanoi) swallows a sword.

Water puppet actors revealing themselves at the end of the show

The next day it was up at 5:30 to get to the airport by 6:30, only to find that the 7:30 flight had been cancelled and the next was at 8:30. Hooray.

After the flight back to Saigon, it was bus to Phnom Penh, with more strange border crossing rituals. The Vietnamese have built a massive building on their side of the border, with offices for customs, police, etc; but it’s all empty except for 2 disinterested guards in those little high passport stamping cubicles, and 2 more at a ratty table by the door re-checking what the first ones did.

On the Cambodian side, an equally grand border complex was largely used as expected, although the x-ray machines for luggage were left switched off, and the luggage stayed on the bus. After the border post, it’s dry, dusty and covered in litter, combined with lots of small and glitzy/tacky casinos under construction to woo the Vietnamese. After that was the “Manhattan special economic zone”, with some warehouses and so on also under construction.

Finally, it was back to Phnom Penh, empty the bag into the laundry basket and eat some 2 minute noodles for dinner – my last $2 had literally been spent on the tuktuk home from the bus station.