After a nice Western/Vietnam breakfast at the hotel, we started the day with a visit to the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum. Many of the local Vietnamese were seen queuing up to pay respect their national hero who died in 1969. It was said that if a Vietnamese has never seen Ho Chi Minh in his life, it is like he/she has never existed. Our tour guide briefed us the history of Vietnam. This is story from another angle of history.
We moved on to visit the Presidential Palace and the One Pillar Pagoda.
The Temple of Literature (pic with the Vietnam girls in their pretty ‘Ai Dao’) and Tran Vu Pagoda.
After lunch break, we visited another pride of Vietnam, which is the Museum of Ethnologic, which exhibits the history and lives of the minorities in Vietnam.
We were rushed off to watch the Water Puppet show. Kids were quite entertained by the puppets but the adults were quite bored since the show was a little too long and we couldn’t understand the story line which was all in Vietnamese language.
After that, we had a one-hour tour around the Old Quarters on the cyclos (like trishaw in Malaysia) – street pollution is worse than in Malaysia, since you see hundreds on motorcycles and cars honing their way through the busy traffic and dusty roads. Motorcycles going in opposite directions is a common sight.
We had a dinner of chicken noodle soup (35,000 dong per bowl). Normally a bowl of noodle cost only 20-25,000 dong each. Only 2nd day and we had the our 2nd experience of being charged sky high. On the day before, we were charged 175,000 dong for a taxi ride which normally would only cost 26,000 -50,000 dong! So, beware of “axes” around Vietnam.
And off we go for an overnight train to Lao Chai-Sapa (on the Kings Express).
My 2 kids shared a 4-berth cabin with A-ma and Ah-Kong.
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