Hanoi - Day 2

A took advantage of another free breakfast, uploaded some more photos onto flickr and eventually set out toward the Army Museum.

Having negotiated my way across numerous busy streets I found the museum open, but closing for early lunch is 45 min. I decided to make my way back into town and see about booking a tour to Halong Bay. I wandered around until I found an official looking 'Sinh Cafe - Booking Office'. I had been informed that Sinh Cafe was probably the best agent to use, but the problem is that there are hundreds of fake offices and I didnt really know which one was real. I spent a bit of time explaining what I wanted and they seemed to pick a good looking tour, with a good boat, and the itinerary sounded good. It was more expensive that I had planned for, but I went for it anyway. I will tell you in great detail in further entries why this was a big mistake!

I found a normal cafe on a street corner and went in for lunch. There were plenty of locals in there eating, so it looked a good choice. When the chap handed me the menu he opened it at the drinks, and later said they werent doing food! When I pointed at everybody else eating he then offered to grab me some food from the street vendors over the road. I accepted, and it was excellent! A meat soup with noodles to dip in and spring rolls on the side. No doubt he overcharged me, but at 60,000 ($3) it was still a reasonable price.

Back I trotted back to the museum. It was now early afternoon and the place was getting hotter, but there were ominous clouds overhead. Sure enough, there were soon some very large drops of rain appearing. My timing was impeccable, because I stepped under the veranda of the Museum and the heavens opened. You would be soaked in seconds, so heavy was the rain. Phew!

The museum was pretty good. Lots of weapons, each with a nice little caption telling its story. 'This rifle belonged to blah blah blah, who used it to shoot dead 25 Americans in one day in Sept 1968' for example. They also had captured tanks, helicopters, missile launchers, you name it. They ought to call it the museum of military pride. It did also have some good exhibitions of photos and documents, which were well presented to tell some of the story of the war. Outside was the flag tower, with awkward narrow spiral staircase that I climbed to give me a view of the city and of the military trophies on show in the yard.

The sun had come back out, and it felt unbelievably hot. The humidity had not relented with the rain at all. I headed back to the hostel for a shower to cool off.

That evening I went to the Water Puppet theatre by the lake and booked a ticket for the following evening. I found a place to eat that charged me a lot (well relatively speaking) for a pretty average dish. Well, it was probably not too bad, but just not to my tastes. I went to bed.