Hanoi 4ever : The Final Chapter

We began Day 4 in Hanoi with disappointment.

Upon arriving at breakfast at our semi-regular table at our regular Hanoi hotel, my regular order was unavailable. Toast would be fine they said, no problem whatsoever with the toasting me some bread (aside from their persistent problem of not actually toasting the toast, instead only introducing the bread to a heat-source momentarily then swiftly yanking it away lest it get a sweat on), but they were out of the ingredients to concoct scrambled eggs. Fortunately however they were able to root around in the cupboards to find the completely different required ingredients for fried eggs, so I had those instead. This culinary inventiveness however, per some cognitive one-in-one-out policy, did require them to forget how to make even their own 'interpretation' of toast and so they came served with a crusty roll of bread.

Fortunately the day quickly recovered from this extremely mild annoyance, though clearly didn't generate sufficient wordage to remove the breakfast bit in the edit.

Realising it had been almost eighteen hours since we last visited a temple, we first rushed out to a temple. The distinguishing feature for this one, Bach Ma Temple, was it was dedicated to or inspired by a white horse and so had a decorated artificial white horse in the main worshippy section. This was different as, generally, the animals portrayed have been one of the four key spiritual animals: the dragon, the unicorn, the turtle and the fourth one.

Before Mark told us this one was the white horse temple we momentarily considered that the white horse was a unicorn. In retrospect that was a stupid consideration, though not because the horse was horn-less; a bee without it's stinger remains simply a very safe very dead bee. Turns out unicorns native to Vietnam look quite dissimilar to their western genetic cousins, something we learnt at our next stop, the National History Museum.

The journey there was quite fascinating as it involved walking through the French Quarter, an area of the city we'd heard rumours was now dilapidated as the result of some dastardly scheme to revenge historical repressive transgressions with subdued real-estate prices. This transpired to be fake news as instead it was the fanciest, most up-market district of the city, home to a Prada store, a Rolls Royce garage and a Hilton hotel no-doubt peeved about their ranking in the Google search results. It was still Hanoi so the streets were as perilous to cross as ever, but it was the sort of area where you felt if you got struck the emergency services might actually attend the scene.

Near the one and only and very busy petrol station in Hanoi (that we saw during our brief stay) we found the museum. We learnt things aside from the weird-unicorn tidbit, which I'm yet to fully verify, but that's the only thing that really stuck - still had a bit of a han'goi-ver at this point. I learnt something about the Mongols I hadn't known previously, but that was something Woody told me so doesn't count.

After being kicked-out so the museum staff could go for lunch, we headed to the Women's Museum, where we finally learnt about women. There were exhibits on marriage traditions, birthing rituals and some very sombre displays telling the stories of female rebels killed whilst fighting for freedom. There was also space dedicated to the Mother Goddess, an important deity to many Vietnamese people whom they thank when things go well, pray to when things go badly and are just text once-or-twice a week when things are fine. She likes beer and Mother Goddess shrines usually contain stacks of beer cans gifted to her. It is in honour of the Mother Goddess that we have been sure to consume a beer every evening since arriving.

For lunch we stopped at a roadside outlet and indulged in another Vietnamese specialty, pho. A couple of us had tried pho before, at Pho no less, and I can say with confidence that Pho restaurant in the UK nails the taste absolutely, if not the rough-and-ready ambience ours and therefore presumably all genuine pho is served.

After lunch we headed to the Ambassadors Pagoda, in my view the most impressive pagoda we've yet seen. Discussion regarding this assessment raised the valid concern as to whether the grounds surrounding a pagoda should be factored into it's overall aesthetic merit, in which case the Confucian temple wins the gold star. We agreed that the best outcome would be to put the Ambassadors Pagoda in the Temple of Literature grounds and so filed the appropriate planning applications to make it happen. We also found some guy apparently asleep on the floor one of the shrine rooms so, mature thirty-somethings that we are, took a sneaky selfie with him in lieu of checking for a pulse.

We stopped by Lenin park, entry to which is free for locals but a gouging 60p for tourists, which we were racially-profiled to be. Whilst beautifully kept, it looked as though it had once tried to be a rudimentary amusement park but hadn't removed the tired attractions and rides once the attempt had failed/ceased. There was also a serious lack of Lenin, 100% less in fact than where we'd seen the Lenin statue a couple of days back. We postulated that the statue might be better placed here so as to more efficiently consolidate the Lenin experience into a convenient singular locale for Lenin-heads to congregate and collectively get their Lenin-on, but had filed enough paperwork for one day.

We visited yet another temple (I'm not souring on the experience, but there's only so much you can say). This one felt akin to a community centre, with kids playing football in the courtyard. We got told off for sitting on the steps with our back to the shrine and were pointed toward the designated seating area, but left in shame.

To conclude the day part of the day we trekked to the venue claiming to produce the original Hanoi 'egg coffee', situated in a narrow alley nestled between tens of imitators. Basically a cappuccino with the milk replaced with a whipped egg-whites/butter/cheese mixture and was far more delicious than Mark and I anticipated. Woody, disliking coffee and egg and with a very finite tolerance for hot drinks in general, decided it probably wasn't for him.

In the evening we decided to bypass the traditional 'seated dinner' for a true street-food experience, ordering steak butties from a roadside vendor before being directed to a table in hitherto unseen seating area. Determined to eat on our feet we finished our tasty sandwiches and found somebody grilling skewers at the side of the road for seconds. Failing to find a sufficiently grubby-looking dessert purveyor on the streets, we settled for a blended ice-cream dessert in a place sufficiently clean to be labelled a 'parlour', then headed to the hotel for an early night ahead of our boat trip tomorrow where, as expected, I've no Wi-Fi so haven't been able to post this until Saturday. Call off the rescue squads - we're alive!Read more