Hanoi and Halong Bay

Hanoi is the capital of the north and I expected it to be much like Ho Chi Minh City. I was happy to find it much prettier and easier to navigate with narrower roads for easier crossing. Along the way people kept telling me how cold it was up there, but being Irish, I found that 16 degrees a perfectly normal temperature. At the heart of Hanoi is a large lake, adding to its beauty. Everywhere decorations were being put up for Tet, which is the Vietnamese new year, which this year was falling on the 9th of February. Although it might have been interesting to see, I planned to be well out of the city by then. I'd been told that everything shuts down for the week and it becomes hard to get around. It's there biggest celebration.

While Hanoi I visited a couple of museums, the first being the Hanoi Prison. It had been around for centuries, first used by colonist French to inhabit misbehaving Vietnamese in horrid tiny conditions. Then during the war, used to inhabit American soldiers. The museum boasts of its fair treatment of the soldiers, letting them celebrate Christmas and how the soldiers called it the 'Hanoi Hilton' cause it was almost like a hotel. We were shown videos of smiling Americans having a great time. A quick google search however would reveal a different side to the story, where inhabitance were tortured and forced to sign anti america declarations.

We also visited the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum, but thanks to bizarre and awkward opening hours didn't actually get to the Mausoleum part. We did however get to go to the most bizarre museum I've ever been in, which was the Ho Chi Minh museum. It was a strange conceptual place where it seemed that they were trying to bring the audience into his head, illustrating his thoughts and ideas through post modern installations. Bizarre. And to add to the bizarreness I had a couple of different groups of young adults want to get there photograph taken with me. I can only guess because of my white skin and blonde hair. I politely declined.

While at Hanoi I also did an overnight trip to Halong Bay, although it was entirely the wrong time of year for it. The morning we left it was lashing rain in Hanoi, but during the three hour bus trip to the coast it stopped, but remained misty and cloud. It's a world heritage site and in the bay are more than 2000 islands of limestone mountains. Although it was pretty cold it wasn't so misty that we couldn't see anything, it was pretty cool to see these beautiful islands appear out of the mist.

We'd booked our trip through our hostel, it was the 'Castaway Tour' trip and was more expensive than most. Had it been sunny it probably would have been worth the money, as your brought to the hostels private beach on one of the islands where we stayed the night. Because it was so cold the only thing to do was drink, which was basically what we'd been doing the whole time on the boat too! It was good fun and there was a good and very interesting mix of people. My least favourite were possibly the 14 Irish nurses who had been singing our national anthem and randomly speaking in Irish for no reason whatsoever. Being around them was worse than being in Coppers. Another interesting character was a guy with I Love Cork scribbled on his arm, but was infact English. I never saw him wearing a top, just shorts, and it was cold. He had an invisible dog who's name he'd call randomly and run after. He also liked to show you where he wet himself a bit and I heard he had lots of photo in his phone of his and friends penis' dressed up as different characters.
Mostly people were more normal and just good craic. Drinking went on long into the night,drunken deep long conversations were had on the beach.

The next morning I said a sad goodbye to Louk and Karola who were going to Capa as me the Aussies and Rob got the boat back very early to Halong and then the bus to Hanoi. Hangovers all round!