Hanoi Photos


Eager to reach Halong Bay, a destination we had been salivating over for more than a month, we decided to only stay a single night in Hanoi. The 14 hour overnight bus from Hue dropped us off a bit of a distance outside of the city, maybe to avoid the city traffic. When we got off the bus, there was the normal army of taxi drivers there to greet us. One driver was particularly persistent and must have asked us ten times if we needed a taxi. He told us it could not be walked, eight kilometers, and was flabbergasted when we didn't flinch at hearing that distance. It turned out to be more like five kilometers, but we had to walk around for forty five minutes to find a reasonably priced hotel. Hanoi seemed to be richer than the rest of Vietnam. The locals were heavier, there were more cars, and the hotels were three to five times as expensive.

I visited the "Hanoi Hilton" prison and was surprised to learn that although it's famous in the U.S. for housing captured American pilots, for the bulk of its history it was used during the colonial period by the French to hold local dissidents. That's actually what the building is dedicated to today, memorializing the Vietnamese dissidents that were imprisoned and tortured there, but they do also mention the U.S. pilots and had John McCain's flight suit on display. They had pictures of the U.S. prisoners exercising and playing sports in the yard and a video that claimed the U.S. soldiers were lucky to have been prisoners of the Vietnamese government.

Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum was a short walk away, but it was quite lackluster compared to the haunting royal mausoleums in Hue.