I thought this was a holiday! This morning we had to get up at 5am to be out of the building by 6am and off to the airport for our flight to Hanoi. In the Vietnamese language every word is only one syllable so it's really Ha Noi. I enjoy Vietnam Airlines; the service is good and the food is good too. I was amazed that they even served whiskey with the lunch.
Hanoi airport was quite an experience. I'm used to being treated specially in this part of the world, being white, elderly and definitely foreign, but it wasn't the case here. I presented my passport to an officer, who did smile, and then he got down to work. He examined every page of my passport, even the empty ones at the back. It looked as if he was trying to see if the page had a pocket inside it with secret information. Then he put my passport under a special light and all sorts of words appeared that I never knew were on my passport. Finally, he checked all my Vietnamese visas from earlier visits and he also checked them on his computer; I was there ages. Luckily, I've learnt to switch off and go into my own world.
The weather was quite a change to Saigon where we moved from 6C in the morning to 31C in Hanoi. Our tour guide, Mr. Yang, was waiting for us and he took us to a bus. I was ready to flop on my hotel bed but he said we would be having lunch first and then going on a tour of a famous temple. I really don't do temples that well but there was nothing I could do about it. The meal was very good but I'd just had lunch on the plane so I wasn't that hungry - that wasn't the case with the rest of the group.
The temple was from the 11th Century and was connected with the Emperor's desire for education and Confucianism. I learnt a few things including the five virtues - love of Emperor, parents, children, brothers and sisters, friends. From there we went on a walking tour of the narrow streets of the old quarter. Hanoi is totally different to Ho Chi Minh. It covers a larger ground area but has only 8.5 million people as against 12 million in HCM City. The main streets are wide, but no car can go down the narrow streets, and so there are 1 million cars and 5 million motorbikes. HCM City has countless high-rise buildings, whereas in Hanoi they are a rarity, which is strange when one considers that it's the country's capital. We walked our feet off. In contrast to a shopping area in the UK, with its endless charity shops, restaurants and pubs, the streets in Asia are full of shops with rarely one of them closed, and definitely no charity shops. Mr. Yang can't have travelled to Cambodia because he took us to the central market which is a poorer version of a similar one in Phnom Penh. I was grateful when he decided we should stop and have a sugar cane juice.
