Hellos and goodbyes

I spent nine days in Ha Noi, the capital of Viet Nam. This was about six days too many. From the start, Niels and I just didn’t warm to the city. It was pretty enough, with some nice lakes and cluttered little streets lined with markets, cyclos and motorbikes. But it just wasn’t Sai Gon. And we loved Sai Gon. Admittedly, the dramas with rooms (mentioned in the prevous entry) didn’t help matters much.

Ha Noi was a real turing point on my trip. It was the place from where Niels left me, to go home for five weeks, before jetting off the the UK (we will meet again, in July, in the land of clogs and cheese). It was also the place where, two days after Niels left, I met my mum, who will travel through China, Mongolia, Russia, Czech Republic and Austria with me.
It was because of all these arrivals and departures, and the need to get visas and extend visas, that I stayed in the city for so long.
Most of my time was spent in the Old Quarter, which is a busy little area of narrow streets and even narrower allyways. It's chock full of shops, which all clump together depending on what they sell, for example, shoes, toys, sunglasses, airconditioners...
The Old Qurater is centred around a lake (second and third pictures), from which, according to legend, a giant turtle rose out of the water to reclaim a sword that was lent to a king by the gods, to help him defeat Mongolian invaders. Apparently a species of giant tutle actully lives in the lake, and on an island in the middle there is an embalmed 2m long specimen that was caught in the lake in the middle of last century.
Tht turtle isn't the only thing embalmed in Ha Noi. Ho Chi Minh, the former Vietnamese independence fighter, president and national hero is embalmed in a mausoleum. This is despite the fact that Uncle Ho, who was allegedly a very modest man, requested he be cremated. I twice joined in the daily procession of thousands of people to pay him a visit, once with Niels and once with mum. Now I've just got to decide if I want to complete the communist leader trillogy by paying Mao and Lenin a visit when I visit their respective cities over the next two months.