Hoan Kiem Lake and area

We took a walk around around nearby Hoan Kiem Lake on a venture to pick up tickets to the Water Puppet theatre. The Lake provides a welcome calm amongst the constant background of traffic in this busy city. The walk proved challenging to the uninitiated pedestrian anxious about walking across lanes of motorcycles and cars. We had been warned by the hotel desk clerk that the worst thing one can do is to hesitate or backtrack. If you start across and are worried, stop but ideally proceed as that is what the oncoming traffic assumes you are going to do. School runs six days a week 0730-1715h so we realized we were in the midst of a parent pick up zone in addition to rush hour with many motorcycles waiting for their kids to get out. We finally reached the tour office that Doug had prebooked our tickets through. We actually could have bought them at the theatre but for the next day; one could have likely bought them through a tour operator closer to the hotel but it is popular and we suspect that the huge tour buses that pulled up may sop up a lot of the 300 tickets for each show.Read more