The Streets of Ha Noi

We flew from Hué to Ha Noi with Vietnam Airlines and they were very good and we’d recommend them.

Hué Airport:

Ha Noi is smaller than HCMC, about 2/3 the size but there are better roads and more private vehicles there, since it’s the capital and houses embassies and government departments.

But it’s somewhat rougher than HCMC and slight more expensive. There are large gardens and lakes in the city centre which give it a more open feel, although the traffic is just as challenging.

We had tea and coffee in a small coffee shop:

On our first afternoon we walked down to the old French Quarter which were a maze of narrow cluttered lane ways with some evidence of French architecture still surviving and places called “Café de Paris”.

An outdoor BBQ:

Mollie wanted some sticky tape and then we came upon this shop selling nothing but rolls of stick tape:

And we practiced “safe shopping”:

Ice delivered by motobike:

And a kitbag of ???:

But some things are best carried by hand:

Pedicabs are popular in Ha Noi but I didn’t trust them in real traffic:

That evening we went to dinner with Reiner and Marika and had spring rolls made at our table. Not as good as the ones we made ourselves or course:

More pics from Ha Noi:

View from our hotel window:

A food mincer shop:

 

Pretty flowers:

Lunch in the French Quarter:

A Catholic Cathedral in Ha Noi:

The central lake in Ha Noi:

A large clock:

It would almost fit my wrist:

A very smart jewellers shop in a run down building:

A “drive in” restaurant, you drive your motorcycle right inside:

The Opera House in Ha Noi:

It has a nice coffee shop attached:

The missing middle sized clock encased in a quartz block was bought by Mark and Mollie after protracted negotiations. It may or may not have been genuine antique but it was a very interesting piece anyway:

Prue trying out a $700 pair of shoes in the Jimmy Choo shop:

It was good to see our Nicole advertising the Jimmy Choo shop deep in communist Vietnam:

A government building in Ha noi. No pics of Nicole here:

Nice old bridge across the lake to an island temple:

For our farewell tour dinner that night we went to the KOTO restaurant. KOTO stands for “Know One, Teach One” and is an Australian supported vocational training program for the homeless and disadvantaged youth of Vietnam.

It is a worthy cause we were happy to support, and we’d had lunch there a couple of days earlier:

And we were in good company too, even our former Prime Minister had visited the restaurant (although she’d left before we got there, several years before actually), but Kiwi’s Stephen and Kirsty still reverently moved aside for the photo:

But actually our Julia was just one (October 2010) of a long line of antipodean public figures to visit the KOTO restaurant.

Foreign Minister Bob Carr; the Premier of Tasmania, the Hon Lara Giddings MP; the Honorable Tom Kenyon MP, Minister for Employment etc. etc. for South Australia; the Governor-General of New Zealand, Lt Gen The Rt Hon Sir Jerry Mateparae; and the not so honorable David and Janet Ribbans have all had lunch there. Nice to see our taxes are being well spent, but how many Vietnamese youths could have benefited from all this expense?

And on that high (?) note we paid our respects and thanked Phu for guiding us so well across the length if not breadth of Vietnam, and for teaching us a few new words and phrases and a lot of Vietnamese history. He seemed genuinely appreciative of our company even though he’s done this same tour many times before.

And that was the end of our tour. We said our farewells to the group that had become quite well knitted by now, and split up to embark on our onward or return journeys across the globe.

We’d had a good ride together.