Day 13 - Hanoi Elegance And The Old Quarter

November 21st, yet another travel day. Hué was a lovely little respite from the craziness of the traffic in Saigon, if only because there are a lot less people there and not necessarily because they actually drive more sane.

We had breakfast at the hotel and then packed up our stuff for checkout. We went down to the desk and settled up our bill. We tried to insist once again that they charge us the full price for the bigger room we were given but they would have none of that. They offered to arrange a car for us to the airport and we left our stuff with them to store until it was time to leave. We had about an hour or so to kill so we just took a long walk around town to places we didn't see the day before.

One last stroll around Hué and off to the airport we went.

The plane to Hanoi as a lot more full then the one we took from Saigon as there was a tour group, senior citizens from England it seemed, on our flight.

This time the pilot of our flight was not American sounding. He sounded British instead. Does Vietnam Airlines not hire Vietnamese pilots?

Glad we had the hotel in Hanoi arrange for our pick-up from the airport so we didn't have to do any of the research on which cabs to catch or avoid, or figure out how much we should pay to know if we were getting ripped off. We walked through the gauntlet of drivers offering us rides to the guy holding a sign with my wife's name on it.

Back in the crazy traffic of another large Vietnamese city, it took forever to get to the hotel. We finally got to the Old Quarter in Hanoi and our hotel.

We were staying at the Hanoi Elegance 2 Hotel, around the corner from the original Hanoi Elegance which causes a lot of confusion among travelers since neither one's sign specify if it is number one or two. This would turn out to be the favorite hotel of our entire trip. First, the people there were so freaking nice and helpful and they always remembered who we were and which room we were in when we stopped to pick up our room key every day after returning from sightseeing.

Also, we had the most awesome room! I had read some reviews on Tripadvisor.com before we picked this hotel and more than one suggested a specific room, #705 on the top floor. This was the most expensive hotel on our trip ($75) except for the one night at the resort in Can Tho, but it was really worth it. The manager showed us to our room and we couldn't believe our eyes when we walked in. The room had huge windows on three sides and glass doors that opened up to a terrace overlooking the street below.

(click on images for larger pictures)



At just about every place we stayed on this trip there was usually Internet access available in the lobby and free wi-fi in the room if you had a laptop with you, which we did not. But in our room at the Hanoi Elegance there was wi-fi in the room with the laptop provided by the hotel!



There was a complimentary bottle of wine and a plate of fresh fruit, which was replenished every day. The fruit, not the wine.



After reveling in our new hotel room for a while and taking a bunch of pictures we decided to go check out Hanoi. We walked all around the Old Quarter, which is exactly what is sounds like. It is the oldest section of Hanoi and has all of the historic-looking buildings with tiny, winding streets and lots of cobblestone sidewalks. It's kind of like Beacon Hill in Boston without the annoying accents.

But the small amount of room on the streets and the mass amount of pedestrians all over the Old Quarter does not stop anyone from driving just as crazy as they do in Ho Chi Minh City. A dizzying number of motorbikes zip around the Old Quarter all day long as well as a decent amount of cars, vans and small tour buses. The sidewalks are really narrow to begin with and then are blocked in a whole bunch of places by parked bikes or motorbikes and the makeshift restaurants and bars that line the sidewalks of Hanoi. So not only is the traffic crazy, but you have to walk in it all the time to get around.

But the Old Quarter is definitely a charming place. The hustle and bustle of life there is just fantastic to be around.







This part of Hanoi is also a lot like New York with each street or block known for selling a particular product. One street might be where all the candy stores are located, on the next block you get your coffee, here's the corner with the luggage stores and on the stretch of road on the NE side of the Hoan Kiem Lake is where all the shoe stores are lined up. Kept thinking of New York's Flower District, Garment District or Indian Row. OK, really I thought a lot more about the episode of The Simpsons when Homer asks his new boss where he can find a hammock (Scorpio: "...it's the hammock complex on third." Homer: "Oh, the hammock district.")

Being such a big tourist area, non-Asian walking around is always being asked if they want to buy a book, some fruit or a ride either on a motorbike or cyclo. Some of the women with the fruit baskets wouldn't just try to sell us fruit. Some of them would walk up and try to put the basket-balancing stick on Lisa's shoulder to have us take a picture. Obviously trying to scam some money out of the tourists. We kept waving them off, though Lisa said she probably wanted to get one before we left because her mom likes hokey pictures like that.

Later in the day we noticed that there was some announcement being made over loudspeakers up on poles all over the Old Quarter. It probably went on for a good 20-30 minutes and sounded very Orwellian despite the fact that we didn't know what as being said. Granted, it could have been the weather report for the next day, what did we know?

For dinner we went and found a place that I found out about on Happy Cow, called Com Chay Adida. It was a little off the beaten path and we had to walk a little ways to get there. We were definitely the only tourists around by the time we got to the area where the restaurant is located. On the block where it was located there were a bunch of street vendors as well, and I'm pretty sure we saw a whole cooked dog hanging on a hook at one of them.

Com Chay Adida is a fantastic restaurant in a colonial-era townhouse. In the middle of the place there is an open shaft through to the floors above with a rock garden and little pond on the ground floor. The ladies who waited on us didn't know English but they were super nice about the language barrier and we just pointed to the menu to tell them what we wanted. This is a lot easier to do at a vegetarian restaurant, knowing that no matter how badly you communicate you won't be brought a plate of squid or dog testicles.

This was one of the best places we ate on this trip, they had great faux meat and noodle soup.

After dinner we walked around Hoan Kiem Lake. At several spots around the lake, when the walkway would open up into a little plaza, there were groups of people out doing aerobics. And damn if Hanoi didn't also have those guys with scales all over the place. Although here they seemed to be even poorer and older people hawking the weigh-yourself service. Several of them had even had just your common bathroom scale instead of the fancier stand-up versions. Who knows, maybe they had a run of business after the aerobics people finished exercising.

Back at the hotel I enjoyed some complimentary wine on our terrace before bed.



Next - Uncle Ho not at home, Temple of Literature and sandals!

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