Hanoi Day One

 After breakfast we meet up with our tour guide Duc and fellow tourers. Or so we thought. There were three choices, we chose the National museum and the Hanoi prison. We were the only two on that tour, so still haven’t made contact with other members. At least we had a private tour!  It was a short ride to the museum and our guide Mike was excellent. Vietnam has a history of thousands of years and the artefacts and exhibits of their development was very interesting. We learnt about the continual Chinese attempts to invade and how they continually defeat the Chinese and even defeated the Mongols. The French occupation and their eventual departure, battles with Cambodia, the USA and the eventual unification of the South and North. 

At the prison there are two parts, the French period where dissident Vietnamese were imprisoned and tortured and the USA period where captured American pilots were held and treated humanely. The French were barbaric in the treatment of the prisoners, while the Vietnamese treated the American pilots well. It was obviously government propaganda, and the descriptions lauded the heroic efforts of the Vietnamese to overthrow the French, while the Vietnamese were kind to their prisoners despite the indiscriminate bombing of their country. When I asked our guide about it he said they treated them kindly so they could get information on how to shoot down the B52 bombers. Hence the Americans gave the prison the name - Hanoi Hilton. 

 The Vietnamese are a very friendly and hospitable people. But they don’t appear to obey any road rules, particularly the motor scooter riders and they are everywhere. They go against lights, cross lanes, ignore cars and pedestrians. It is chaos but the traffic keeps moving.