Hanoi: The Curse of Ho Chi Minh
Hanoi is huge. It's loud and crowded; busy, dirty, incredibly hot and muggy. The people rarely smile and the heavy motorbike traffic doesn't stop. But it does have an industrious energy about it which is slightly redeeming. Everywhere you look there are women selling things out of baskets, people eating at pavement cafes and men asking if you need a motorbike-taxi. Though after peaceful little Laos, Hanoi still took some getting used to..!
We found our hotel after being shouted at in the street by a very loud and bolshy Vietnamese girl who promised us we'd fall in love with the room the moment we saw it. Smiling, we thought that was quite a claim and so decided to call her bluff. Turned out that she was right. The room was huge, didn't smell of damp, had enormous windows, air-conditioning and the bed wasn't too hard. Perfect.
After a relaxing morning we decided to kick off our exploration of Hanoi with a trip to see the preserved body of Ho Chi Minh (also affectionately known as "Uncle Ho"), considered to be the father of communism in Vietnam and leader of the anti-US forces during war. We walked there via the train station and a lovely place for lunch and arrived at around 3pm. Only to find it closed. We read the Lonely Planet guide in puzzlement and spotted the tiny bit of text which says that Ho Chi Minh's remains can only be seen between 8 and 11 am. Ok, our bad, next time.
So we walked around the back of the mausoleum to have a look at the Ho Chi Minh museum which was definitely open according to the LP. But it was closed as well! A random gardener explained to us that we couldn't go in because the President of Laos was in the museum. What are the chances?!
So we tried again the next day. This time - after some serious power walking - we arrived at Uncle Ho's mausoleum at 10:45. It was close, only fifteen minutes left on the clock. But, unbelievably, the mausoleum was closed again! We stood milling outside with other confused-looking tourists as the guards rolled up the red carpet. Maybe it was the President of Laos again? This time it was wikitravel which informed us that no, the mausoleum was closed because last entry is at 10:15. Lonely Planet, damn your eyes.
That afternoon we went to the Vietnam Ethnology Museum where we found out that there are many different tribes throughout Vietnam, each with their own slightly different language and traditions. We also saw some extremely impressive village houses reconstructed in the museum grounds.
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There's an intermission here where we went first to Halong Bay and then to Sapa. We did have a little time in Hanoi between the two, but this was really just long enough to have a shower and some food.
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On the night bus back from Sapa, I was suffering with some sort of gut infection and didn't sleep much. So our next day in Hanoi was mostly one of me lying in our new hotel room waiting for it all to go away. By the evening I felt ok enough to try leaving the HSZ (Hotel Safety Zone) and go out for some dinner.
On our way out of the building we were stopped by the boy on reception who wanted to tell us something. He explained to us that as we'd checked in at 6am, and as hotel policy clearly states that customers should check out at noon, then we should have checked out at noon. And we should pay another half day's board to be allowed to stay until the next day!
We laughed at him at first, but it soon became clear he was actually serious. Then it became clear that he wasn't going to listen to us and so we asked to see the boss who would hopefully be reasonable (in the literal sense of the word). Unfortunately he was just as bad as the reception boy and we spent a good hour arguing with him and trying to make him see/admit that he was wrong. We were absolutely adamant and refused to let him tell us that it was an ok thing to do. We told him that we would tell the world about this hidden policy and that we'd give a full account of it on TripAdvisor.
During the proceedings, a couple walked in laden with bags, Simon, quick as a flash, turned to them and said "Are you thinking of staying here?".
"Yes," came the reply.
"I wouldn't, they're trying to cheat us out of money right now. You're best off somewhere else."
"Thanks," they said, backing out of the door. At which point Si turned round to the boss and said
"Right, so you've just lost $20 there. How long are you going to carry this on for..?".
But the boss was absolutely pig headed; which was no mean feat given that he was facing down a smiling but passionately argumentative short woman with a loud voice and an increasingly furious towering man with arm muscles bigger than his leg. In fact, he actually got nastier as time went on, first telling us he'd get a policeman ("of my choosing") in the next morning to sort things out and then telling us that now we had to pay double.
Then I had a brainwave. Every hotel in Vietnam has to tell the Government who is staying with them every night. I asked to see the document relating to our stay and it showed that we were due to check out the following day (not the day we had arrived). Ha ha! We had them. How could we be forced to check out the day before we were legally due to check out? They didn't have a leg to stand on any more, now it was just that they would never admit they were trying to cheat us. So, with our argument still going round in pointless circles, we just walked out and went for dinner.
The next morning we played some Mission Impossible music in our heads, donned our backpacks, braced ourselves and walked to the hotel lobby. It a bit of an anticlimax, though, as there was no policeman, and neither were the boss or the boy anywhere to be seen. There was a girl on reception who had probably been briefed to make sure she got our money but neither she nor her english were any match for Simon's serious face. He put our key down on the desk said "we're leaving now, ok?". To which she looked really uncomfortable and mumbled something about us checking out early. Si said, "yes we're leaving early, ok?" "Ok," said she. And so we walked out of the door. Victory was ours!
On cloud nine we decided to celebrate by finally seeing Ho Chi Minh's remains. We had breakfast, booked our bus for that evening and then took a motorbike taxi to the mausoleum. Slightly stressed we arrived outside at 10:07. Just in time for last entry!
And it was closed.
In disbelief, we asked at a ticket office, to find out what was going on. Closed on Fridays apparently. What?! No! But there was nothing we could do. After all those attempts we still ultimately failed to see the man himself. The curse of wanting to see Ho Chi Minh's preserved body continues to this day...
We DID manage to get into the museum this time though. Not for long, mind you as it closed up at lunchtime and security started herding us out after an hour; they even started switching the lights off on the displays which scuppered our last-ditch plan of just walking out really slowly and reading the displays as we went. Despite the sudden ending, the museum is a really interesting place, very creative and well-polished. Ho Chi Minh is obviously adored by the Vietnamese and - regardless of the museum's tireless propaganda - I can understand why.
After lunch we went to the Hanoi prison. It was built by the French to crush the revolutionary uprisings of the Vietnamese and then later used by the North Vietnamese to hold captured American pilots. The propaganda fairy had been here as well and the story we were repeatedly told was that the Vietnamese prisoners were treated worse than appallingly by the French, but that the US soldiers were treated exceptionally well by the Vietnamese. I'm inclined to believe the former may well be true (there were some pretty horrendous rooms in that prison) but if the latter is true then I suspect that the Geneva Convention probably deserves a big slice of the credit cake. Still, it was a brutal and incredibly interesting place to see.
Then, after all that, it was time to leave Hanoi for the last time. We did it the relaxing way and caught yet another night bus to Hoi An.