Our last day in Hanoi was terrific, another lovely breakfast (fried rice and scrambled eggs, mmm, seriously tasty!) at the smashing 'Hanoi Boutique Hotel No1', then out to roam this crazy city one last time. Sadly, we'd missed our chance to visit Uncle Ho, as his mausoleum is closed on Friday (perhaps that's his 'wash & brush-up day), so we hit the 'Temple of Literature', which was ok, pretty, but not 'all that', followed by 'Hoa Lo Prison Museum', otherwise known as the 'Hanoi Hilton'. This was a prison established by the 'evil French colonialists' to detain and torture 'patriotic Vietnamese Revolutionary men and women', and then used by the North Vietnamese forces to 'house' captured 'imperialist American soldiers and airmen' who, although they had been guilty of 'perpetrating atrocities on the heroic Vietnamese People', were kept in 'humane conditions', were 'fed well, and treated kindly', and 'were in no way tortured, beaten, starved, or coerced into making anti-imperialist and pro-revolutionary statements, no way, no sir, uh-uh'. Well, I suppose the truth lies somewhere in-between. The French WERE evil colonial masters, the Yanks WERE guilty of atrocities in a frankly barbarous war, but the captured US combatants WERE treated very badly by their Revolutionary captors. As Brits though, for once, we could wander around without feeling like 'the bad guys', we weren't to blame (for once), and we enjoyed pointing this out to some handy American tourists who were visiting the Prison, who muttered something about US forces 'originally entering Viet Nam for the right reasons', they weren't even convincing themselves! Sadly, there weren't any handy French tourists for us to point out just how evil they had been, and to be fair, we're on a sticky wicket when it comes to imperialism, colonialism, and atrocities against indigenous populations!
After all that, we were hungry! So Sal randomly chose for both of us from the menu in an 'authentic' Vietnamese restaurant, which featured such items as 'Top of form fried squid discharge' (mmm, discharge, a personal menu favourite of mine), so I was a bit wary! The man brought a huge cooking pot to our table, it sat on top of a mini-stove, and it already had stock and veggies simmering away. Then he added beef and prawns, which he swirled around for a minute, before dropping them in our bowls, cooked to perfection. This went on for about an hour, cooking more beef and prawns, then veggies, and finishing with noodles, and it was absolutely gorgeous! All for about £6.00 each, cheap as chips!
We did a bit more mooching, stopped for coffee at our new favourite place in Hanoi, 'Ca Phe Moca', then went back to pack and prepare for our overnight rail journey to Hue, not knowing what to expect!