The first thing I have to say about Hanoi is about the weather . . . I can’t stress enough how hot it was. Killer hot. Much more difficult than Saigon.
I had a personal tour guide during my first afternoon there, a friend of a friend who picked me up at my hotel and took me around the city on his motorbike. We zipped past some of the major sites like East Lake and the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum. We stopped and toured the Temple of Literature and Ngoc Son Temple in Huan Kiem Lake. He took me to an amazing lunch at what is advertised as the oldest restaurant in Hanoi (more on that later) and to a terrific coffee shop hidden behind a souvenir store where you climb to the rooftop and get a great view of downtown.
I stayed at the Citygate Hotel, so named because it’s next to the eastern gate to the original city walls, in the oldest part of the Old Quarter. In the mornings, a bare-bones street market busts out in the surrounding streets that is fun to witness—just tarps on the ground with all the usual meats and produce being sorted. The sounds of people shouting in the market woke me up by 5:30 a.m. in my 5th-floor room, though the kid who sleeps on the hotel lobby floor slept through it and I had to get him up to unlock the chain on the door and let me out.
I spent most of Monday just walking, taking pictures and trying to manage my dehydration and exhaustion by balancing my iced coffee breaks with water breaks. I got thoroughly turned around in the old quarter a few times and was amazed to see how far off-track I was once I did get my bearings. (I think the dehydration might have had something to do with that, too.) One place I went into for coffee wasn’t serving because the electricity was out. “Too hot,” they said.
During my walk, I made stops at a restored old-time merchant’s house, at about a half dozen temples and at St. Joseph’s Cathedral. Twice before dinner I went back to the hotel to chug a liter of water, shower and wash another sink full of clothes to hang up in my window.
For dinner, I went to a place recommended in the guidebooks, a very old stone and wood house converted to a bar and restaurant, and when I stepped inside, it was HOT. No air con. They seated me at a bar table by the door and I watched the tourists come in, and a fair number of them turned right around and left when they felt the heat. I enjoyed a long dinner and some iced tea, watching the waitresses give each other a hard time, and when I was just about ready to leave, I felt a puff of cool air come in the door, then another stronger puff, and then a tremendous rain came down. In about 20 seconds flat, it wasn’t hot anymore.
I ordered ice cream to wait it out, watching Inspector Gadget on the t.v. over the bar, muted with Vietnamese subtitles. The rain made people giddy, and the best entertainment was watching two American sisters traveling with their kids get laughing fits trying to wrestle themselves into very cheap plastic ponchos that the waitresses were handing out. When the rain let up about half an hour later, I walked back to the hotel, dodging drips off the shade trees, and sat in my room in the dark watching the lightening storm over the rooftops south of the city.
-Robert
