Sunday, May 5, 2024
Some nice street art.
A very hazy sunset.
The famous train street. This is the main line to the north. Whenever a train comes everyone has to be moved aside.
The size of the train when it arrived was much bigger than I was expecting.
We had five nights in Hanoi which was probably two more than we really needed. We had extended our stay so that we'd be there for April 30th which is Reunification Day, a holiday that celebrates the day of the fall of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam war. I assumed there would be festivities of some sort but there was nothing we could find so it was a bit of a mistake to stay longer.
Our timing also wasn't great as we were there during an exceptional heatwave where the temperature was pushing 40° each day, with the felt temperatures around 45°. It was so hot that we had to spend much of the middle of each day indoors. There was also a high level of air pollution so being outside was just generally a bit exhausting.
There isn't a huge amount to see in Hanoi. We visited the old prison originally built by the French which also housed American POWs (and got to read some rather extreme propaganda about how much they supposedly enjoyed their time there). We also went to the mausoleum of Ho Chi Minh where his body is preserved but unfortunately it wasn't open the day we went. Google Maps has proved to be quite bad in Asia so we're slowly being taught the hard way not to trust what it says.
I think I'm at the point now where I've had enough of hot and noisy cities for a while. We'll be mostly in smaller towns and in the countryside for the next few weeks.