Hanoi, Vietnam

The weather here is so tough - hot, high 90’s with very high humidity making it feel 10° hotter. Mid 100’s. I’ve found I like dry heat, but really struggle in this humidity.

Luckily I splurged and got us a nice hotel here with great air conditioning and facilities so we have somewhere nice to escape to - actually splurged for the rest of the trip and booked us in much nicer places from here on out. No more hostels. ❤️ The cost of living is so low in SE Asia that $20-40 a night gets you a very nice, can I even say luxurious place.

We went and looked at a few of the sites - We saw the oldest Buddhist temple in Hanoi, and then walked along the West Lake to Ba Dinh Square and Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum. Continued walking a bit more till we got to the Temple of Literature - originally built as a university in 1070 and dedicated to Confucius. It was very pretty. By that time I was literally soaked in sweat!

After that we headed to Hoa Lo Prison. (Fortunately we’ll air conditioned). It’s the prison originally built by the French in 1886 during their occupation. It was built to hold Vietnamese revolutionaries that were fighting against the French. Later during the Vietnam War, it held the US POW pilots (John Mcain was one) that were shot down, then renamed by the US, the “Hanoi Hilton”.

It was crazy the propaganda - everything there was about the cruel and inhumane incarceration of the Vietnamese by the French. It was cruel - it was inhumane. But there was just one wall that even mentioned the Vietnam war, and that was filled with stories of how well the US pilots had been cared for, which goes completely against what our soldiers say happened. Clearly they want a particular story line being told here. Regardless, it was interesting and intense to see what was left of the prison.

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