Hanoi

 In January 2024 we went on Overseas Adventure Travel's "Inside Vietnam" tour.  This was a terrific tour, on a par with our 2015 "Soul of India" trip.  Since I don't have time to write a detailed blog of this tour, I'll do a short overview, then loads of pictures, with the accompanying text being little more than captions.

Getting to Vietnam was a grueling 28-hour trek, from MSP to O'Hare to Tokyo Narita to Hanoi.  Since we were getting into our hotel after midnight, we decided to add a day on at the beginning, to avoid having to jump right into the tour after a short night's rest.  The group was completely congenial, one of the best we've travelled with: originally, ten women and four men (four couples, two sets of female friends and two women from New York City who had never met before this trip), two from Minnesota (us), two from Richmond, Virginia, two from New York and eight from California.  A few days into the trip, one of the Californians came down with a bad flu (not COVID!) and she and her husband dropped out.

Our Trip Experience Leader (OATese for "guide") was named Tuan, which we assumed was pronounced something like "Twahn."  We assumed wrong.  While the Vietnamese language uses the Latin alphabet, it is a tonal language, like Chinese, and uses several additional letters and a number of diacritical marks.  As a result, the pronunciatiion of written Vietnamese is not intuitive for westerners.  Tuan pronounced his name (something like "Tun?") and politely made it clear that rather than having us butcher it, it would be better to call him "Tom."

All out OAT Trip Experience Leaders have been wonderful, rating at least 8 or 9 out of 10.  Tom was a 10.

He suggested that we change crisp, new $100 bills at an airport exchange bureau, so we changed $200 for more than 4.8 million Vietnamese dong.  This lasted us nearly the whole trip.  Toward the end, we took out another million dong (about $41 US) at an ATM in Ho Chi Minh City.  We used our Visa card often, but, unlike in South America and Scandinavia, cash was not unnecessary.  The very first day, we ran into some confusion about money.  A woman on the street tried to sell us a fan, first for 150, then for 100, but we didn't have any bills smaller than 1000 dong.  It was only after a few days that we realized when people said "one hundred" or "two hundred" as to price, they meant one hundred thousand or two hundred thousand dong.  It had seemed odd, even in Vietnam, where the cost of living is low, that the woman was selling a fan for four-tenths of a cent US!  Four dollars made more sense.

All the hotels were more than acceptable (the Hoi An Central Boutique Hotel was exceptional) and the food was uniformly good.

In most places in the world, the purpose of a sidewalk is to provide walking space for pedestrians.  In Vietnam, that is only a secondary purpose.  The primary purpose is to provide parking for motor scooters.  Most Vietnamese do not have cars.  Every adult Vietnamese has at least one motor bike--more like a Vespa than a Harley.  Since the riders of these vehicles pay no attention to pesdestrian crosswalks, if you wish to cross a street, you have to stride purposefully and confidently into the traffic flow, while bikes zoom past you on either side.  Not for the faint of heart, but it soon becomes a matter of course.

We arrived at the Hanoi airport around 11 p.m. local time (10 a.m. CST) on Monday, January 8, 2024, Tom picked us and four of our fellow travelers up and accompanied us to the hotel, the May De Ville Trendy.

The next morning (Tuesday, January 9), we took a walk around Hoan Kiem Lake, then we went to the National Historical Museum, both the ancient (great) and modern (not great) parts.  In the evening, Tom took a group of us to Pho Thin for beef pho, the only thing they serve.  Very good--the big cockroach that scurried up the wall probably agreed.