Last 'nam post

Before reaching the end point on our Reunification Express route in Hanoi, we made a brief stop at Hue, but as this isn’t a place that impressed me half as much as the others, I’ll gloss over it. I think my main memory from there would be having a bad moped driver who nearly wrote me off…twice. So straight to Hanoi then.

My time in Hanoi was pretty short but I was there long enough to visit the Hanoi Hilton, a name given to a prison used to house American pilots shot down during the Vietnam/American war, and gain my hat trick of dead, communist world leaders, this time Ho Chi Minh. Ho Chi Minh’s Museleum was far more reminiscent of the Russian’s Lenin version than it was of China’s, although I think that’s because the links are close. So close in fact that Ho Chi Minhs body has an annual month long holiday to Russia every November for maintenance. And speaking of dead people, the train delivered us into Hanoi early enough to witness the city zombies take to the streets, their routine the same as the quieter town zombies. Something that was more odd about a Hanoi morning was at about 7am, megaphone style loud speakers began talking (shouting) to the streets below before eventually breaking into patriotic song some time later, nobody responded to it though.

Hanoi was mostly about parting with the group, which is always a shame, stocking up on propaganda posters and planning a couple of days at Halong Bay, to which actually three other members of the group joined me on. Halong Bay is beautiful, a protected area of around 2000 Karst mountains and rocks rising from the sea. We stayed on our boat for the night and enjoyed the views as the sun set and atmosphere changed. The captain of our boat invited us to join him and his sea friends for drinks, (vodka disguised as tea, mildly mixed with coke and housed in a pot), whilst a floating corner store style boat (that stocked little more than vodka, beer, Oreos, Pringles and coke) circled demanding ’Buy something!’. The next morning was good as we took to kayaks to explore caves and find monkeys, which was easy, before sailing back and returning to Hanoi where we, as the remaining four of the group said our goodbyes and all went separate ways.