Hanging in Hanoi

As mentioned in the post about Hue, Nathalie and I transferred up to the Northern-half of the country and onto the Vietnamese capital. My next post was about our time in Ha Long bay. However, sandwiched between this trip were a few days stay in Hanoi. Here's our takeaway.

After landing at Hanoi international airport, we transferred via private taxi to the hotel. As had been the case throughout our travels in Vietnam, there are currently no rail links between the airports and the cities they serve. This has meant that we've been reliant on taxis and private cars to get to and from the city. While there are public buses, the journey times are ridiculous (count two hours to do an 25-minute cab ride) and the fares in taxis and private cars are reasonable enough to make it worth the little extra investment.

The airport in Hanoi is located well outside of the city center. On our ride in, we took an interstate into town. This wouldn't be too impressive on its own other than the fact that a) it was the first interstate we had seen since we had entered Vietnam and b) it was almost completely empty. While Hanoi boasts a population of over 6.5 million, the main mode of transport is scooter/motorbike. Cars are few and far-between, making the high-speed highway a deserted ghost road encircling a giant city.

We wound up booking our hotel on the advice of someone we met at the homestay we were at in Hoi An. As it turns out, the majority of the hotels in Hanoi, at least the ones for tourists (not including business travelers), are located in the old town quarter near the Hoan Kiem lake.

The view from Hoam Kiem lake

Old town is known for its tiny streets devoid of sidewalks (well, technically there are sidewalks, it's just that they're used as motorbike parking spots) and tiny shops. In what looks like a page out of a textbook command economy, each street's shops are dedicated to selling one specific good; i.e. one block would have only shoe shops, another only glasses, another only shirts, etc, etc. This would make sense as it;s a page out of Soviet-style economic policy, and after all, Ho Chi Minh founded his version of Vietnamese communism based on the principles of Marx and Lenin. It was the first time we had seen this sort of segregation since we had arrived in the country and it definitely added to the distinction between the north and the south.

Anyways, to get back to the hotel, our lodging for the evening was located on a street dedicated to selling animal intestines and organs.  We lovingly started to refer to the street as “tripe-town.” On top of the 'distinct' smell, the room was noisy and smelled like cigarette smoke. When we asked at reception if we could change, they said that it wouldn't be possible and that we should just open the window for five minutes for the smell to dissipate. We've taken the habit of only booking rooms for one night as a contingency for these sorts of situations and, sticking to our insurance policy, we checked out the next day and set out looking for a new hotel.

Over coffee from a fifth-floor cafe overlooking the lake, we loaded up the Agoda and booking.com apps on our phones and got a shortlist of places of hotels that were within our budget and looked nice enough to visit. The plan was to show up, visit a room, and if we liked what we saw, try to go direct with them and get a better price.

As it would turn out, whenever we found a room that we liked, as soon as we would ask the price, they would give as a quote at 15-20% higher than what we'd see on our booking engines. We would point out that we found it cheaper online and they would then tell us that those rooms were sold out and that they “hadn't updated the website yet.” 

A side street in old town Hanoi; note 

the merchant selling the white dude

wearing a cone hat a tank top with the  

Vietnamese flag on (I think he 

was trying  

to buy himself street cred; his girlfriend 

was not impressed). 

Others would flat out tell us that they were full, even if the booking engines said otherwise. We soon realized that this was related to the contract that they had with these booking engine. Mainly, it meant that they had to hold x-amount of rooms for the engine until a certain release time at which what point the hotel could throw it back to their capacity.

We weren't able to get this confirmed until the next day when we talked to the hotel manager at the place we wound up staying, but we found it a bit odd as we were offering to cut out the middle man and go direct, meaning that the hotel would avoid having to pay out a commission the booking engine and we would get a lower rate. Win-Win. Additionally, we had observed how little value the Vietnamese, at least in the north, put into respecting or even creating contracts. Needlees to say, we were a bit puzzled.

In the end though, it worked out. We wound booking a room, via Agoda, while in the hotel lobby to prove to the clerk that there was indeed availability and it was cheaper than going direct with them. We spent the better part of six hours walking around the old town looking at hotels and had inadvertently seen most of it by the end of the day. On top of that, our hotel was on the outskirts of this district meaning we had refuge from the chaos and could get a decent night's sleep.

During the rest of our stay, which in total came out to six days, we explored the city and tried to get to know it. We wandered down to the old French quarter to see the remnants of the colonial era. We found the old 'Hanoi Hilton' aka the Hao Lo Prison, which was first used by the French to hold dissidents of colonial rule and then later by the North Vietnamese as an POW camp for US pilots shot down over their territory. The tour was quick to point out the inhumane conditions rendered by the French but cleanly left out the claims of torture made by American pilots after their return back home, but again, nothing about that was surprising.

We saw Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum and the sprawling complex behind it. We went and found the calm lake where the final remains of an American B52 bomber rested where it fell. We explored the grand boulevards with foreign embassies next to government buildings. And maybe most importantly, we felt the schism between the contrasting regions of Vietnam.

Ho Chi Minh's Mausoleum and the parade field in front of it

We started from the South and worked our way up. The further north we went, the less friendly we felt the people were. Business was more transparent down south and easier to understand. The people in Hanoi, while polite, were colder and to the point. The food failed to win our hearts and we wound up eating mostly western food for the remainder of our stay.

After returning from Cat Ba, we figured out our next steps (we've decided to go to the Philippines) and how we would take them. By the time it was all said and done, we left two days after returning to the city. We had the great chance to say goodbye to our friends Louis and Eleanor (they left the same day as we did, returning back to the UK), and with that, we departed Vietnam.

Hanoi, for us, was worth the visit, but mostly for the cultural observations. Would I recommend it as a must see? Probably, if not for anything but to see what it is. But between Hanoi, Hue and Saigon, our favorite was definitely the southern capital and the second city of the country. As we've finished Vietnam, I only think it's fair to give our overall feedback on the country. This though, will be for another post.