Another day in Hanoi today that wasn’t on the original itinerary. We have had a full day of exploring with lots of information from our lovely tour guide ‘Tom’. We almost made it through the day without rain 🙂 .

The day started with a visit to Turtle lake.  We walked across the red bridge to the Ngoc Son temple. The lake has a long history as the home of rare large turtles, which have died out in the lake now, unfortunately. 

We then walked through the local alleys to experience the sights and smells of the old Hanoi and see how the small home based family businesses operate. There were some eye opening differences to Australia in terms of food handling and refrigeration. Many of the businesses were fresh vegetable and meat. Bob had some challenges dealing with the various aromas that hit us as we walked through. 

After a Vietnamese coffee stop we got on the bus and were taken to the Temple of Literature. It was the First University in Hanoi. There was an area with Stone tablets with phd students names. In general the Temple has beautiful grounds and Places of Worship. 

We had lunch at Koto which is a quality Vietnamese restaurant where young people from disadvantaged backgrounds are trained to be chefs and restaurant service staff. There were so many courses! This is starting to feel like a cruise eating-fest on land. 

The next site in todays program was the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum visit. We did visit this a couple of days ago but today we got a lot more information about how the Vietnamese government system operates. We visited the Mausoleum, the historic French building and the stilt houses used by Uncle Ho. These simple stilt houses linked to Uncle Ho’s background from a small village. The heat and humidity really started to bite this afternoon. 

After a cool off in the hotel pool we headed out for a water puppet show near Turtle Lake. We coincided with school pickup time and the roads were even more gridlocked than usual. Quite unbelievable!

The puppet show had a series of short stories played out with water puppets and live music and singing. It was a very interesting cultural display.

We headed out to dinner with too many courses again, with the added bonus of some live music played on a 19 string zither by a very talented young lady. 

Tomorrow we pack up and fly to Ho Chi Minh for a few days.