Vietnam the third: Day 3, Hanoi
Summer in Hanoi. We’ve had a few conversations with locals, like hotel staff, tour guides, and they’ve all had one thing to say, “It’s a shame you’re hear in Summer when it’s so hot, the best time really is October”. And in fairness that is probably true, but our day jobs don’t always provide the luxury of travelling at the best times, so here we are in the heat and humidity.
Today was a walking tour of Hanoi, with the aim of ticking off a few of those boxes for things we haven’t seen in previous visits, as well as something we love to do. So it was Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum, the pagoda at West Lake, and then finishing with street food.
Our friendly guide, L, met us at the hotel at 8am — we’d foolishly decided to skip breakfast as 8am seemed quite early, but then we were awake before 6am anyway thanks to a child somewhere having a great time, and me not shutting the curtains properly. There’s probably a little bit of time zone adjustment too, as Vietnam is GMT +0700 so we’re about an hour ahead normally.
We’d gone with the walking tour option as the hotel had said that getting our own car would be a bit expensive, and hey what’s a 2km walk here and a 2km walk there really? Being honest, I’m struggling a little so far in staying properly hydrated — between sweating like a proverbial, and wearing a mask most of the time, I’m just not drinking enough water. Definitely something I need to get better at.
The highlight of our walk to the mausoleum would have to be getting to train street just in time for a train. This isn’t a street really, more like an alleyway that has some food shops that is basically in touching distance from the trains that pass. It used to have more shops, but some killjoys decided that it was time to apply some basic OSH to this. No longer totally death defying, it’s still cool to watch the train swing through the narrow alleyway, and also the rail guards’ preparation: a couple of minutes before the train is due, half a dozen people will appear out of nowhere with official looking hats, some in uniform, others putting on the uniform shirt there and then. Then they manually wheel out the boom gates to stop traffic, wait for the train to pass, then push the gates back and disappear back into wherever.
Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum. The tour guides say get there early to avoid the queues, and also mention that, once inside, lingering to look is not allowed as people are shunted through at an even pace (also no photos or chewing gum). The tour guides don’t say that the queue will take the best part of 2 hours, in heat that is so bad that even Uncle Ho gets a 2 month annual vacation back to Russia for additional restoration work. The mausoleum is only open some days each week, and mornings only, so when we’re talking about the last weekend before Uncle Ho’s vacation, even 9.20am is not early. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to properly explain my query to Guide L, but I do wonder how many repeat visitors the mausoleum gets, is it somewhere that families go to once or twice a year, because my impression of the tens of thousands that must have attended today was that they surely couldn’t all be first timers. There were a lot of people. I should also mention that queueing appears not to come naturally for the Vietnamese, while most managed to be more orderly than an average group of Italians, there were definitely some interesting moments at the start of the queue. Once we got inside the main gates things seemed to settle, mostly.
Between a couple of hours queueing in the heat while breathing through a mask, then the few minutes as we were in arctic aircon as we were shuffled through the mausoleum before being thrust back into the humidity, I managed to pick up a bit of heatstroke, but I managed to at least sit down while Guide L told us about Ho’s life and history, rather than fall over. It did take a bottle of orange sugar water, basically Tang, to get me back to standing.
Before Uncle Ho masterminded the unification of Vietnam through defeating the French and then the US, he spent time working in a number of kitchens as a chef, so I guess he was used to the heat. His own house on stilts, which we later filed past when I was feeling better, had no kitchen, so I guess he worked out, like everyone else, that Hanoi has such great street food so why cook for yourself?
One thing we’re certainly noticed this trip is how few western tourists there seem to be. I’m not sure I saw another white face in the thousands at the mausoleum today, and even this evening wandering the street markets there were few. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, just an observation, and we certainly haven’t felt any extra pressure on us from the various hawkers etc, even the cyclo drivers, though a little pushy, haven’t been overly pushy. It feels a bit different to last time we were here when vendors did seem more obtrusive, so hopefully this will continue.
After paying our respects to Uncle Ho, the next stop was the pagoda on the west lake. No brainer: we took an airconditioned taxi. Guide L explained how the pagoda is constructed in the northern Vietnam Buddhist style, inspired by Chinese Buddhism, rather than the Indian-inspired Buddhism of the south. I was still a bit head-fuzzy, but the takeaway seemed to be that Chinese style pagodas are tall and thinner.
Then it was time for street food, where again an airconditioned taxi was a necessity, and this one a rare creature that used the meter (none at the mausoleum did, so while it cost 60k to get to the pagoda, the ride back, twice the distance, cost a little under 60k). First stop was for dry beef salad, and mushroom and pork tapioca dumplings. Both were very tasty, the dry beef salad served with green papaya and that was exactly what I needed, the freshness of the strips of almost-vegetable-like fruit adding the extra tang. Guide L also procured some Hanoi sticky rice, stuffed with green mungbean paste and pork, and with a dry dip of crushed peanuts, sesame seeds, and salt to give it an extra lift.
Next stop was for fried stuffed balls of goodness at a place we’d have never found by ourselves as it involved going through another shop, out the back, and up some steps. Savoury and sweet: the savoury stuffed with mushroom and pork, and then dipped in a wonderful sauce, the sweet full of some bean paste and covered in crunchy fried goodness.
Then it was time for bun cha, or as they now call it in Hanoi, bun cha Obama style. From what I can tell, Obama style is just the regular bun cha but with a beer on the side. Bun cha looks a little scary, chunks of barbecued meat in a broth that, at a glance, looks like dripping, but is just soup. Thin round noodles, mixed leaves, and garlic and chili are on the side, and the method is to break up the noodles, and dunk a little at a time in the soup and eat with the pork and accompaniments. And it’s good, especially with beer, the meat has just a hint of bbq charring to give it some extra flavour, the soup has a little bit of sweetness to it, and add some fresh greens to the mix.
Final stop was for dessert, Vietnamese style. A bowl of wonderful fruit chunks with condensed milk: jackfruit, watermelon, rockmelon, avocado. Avocado is more of a dessert fruit in Vietnam, no one has been able to get them hooked on the smashed avo on toast, which is a bit of a shame really as their bread is so good. Maybe some entrepreneur will manage to crack this one.
After some much needed downtime, we headed out to track down one of the other foods on the must-try in Hanoi list: cha ca, or grilled tumeric fish. A dish so Hanoi that it has its own street (old Hanoi names streets after what was traditionally sold there, like shoes, or silk, etc). No 14 Cha Ca Street has some good reviews, so we went off in search, only to find somewhere that looked closed. Fortunately there was a young chap out the front to help, and pointed us into a different shop, where it was up some very steep stairs to a small restaurant that at least had full sized chairs (while I do like the little table and little stool style of eating, my knees don’t always agree). We were shown a couple of seats, presented with a card that said, “Only 1 dish sold here, 170k each”, which certainly cuts down lingering over a menu. Out came a plate of noodles, similar to bun cha noodles, a bowl of greens, small plate of peanuts, small bowl of chili, and a small bowl of something like fish sauce. Then came the small burner with a pan of fish pieces on top, which was lit and then more greens added. The fish and greens cook at the table, and then it’s just put noodles in the bowl, add fish and greens (dill was one of them, didn’t really recognise the rest), and top with condiments. Traditionally served with river fish, cha ca isn’t a strong fishy dish, the white fish chunks are quite meaty, and it’s all good.
Tomorrow is another early start, heading out into the countryside for pretty sights and things. But we’ve stocked up on water and sugary drinks this time.