Hanoi in dirty detail

Promises made
Assurances given
Deception

Taxi scam
Hotel scam
Tour scam

Liars
Cheats
Crooks

Filthy
Dreadful
Den of thieves


We arrived in Hanoi from Luang Prabang by air last Saturday. We took the 'official' Vietnam Airlines shuttle into the city. We told the driver our hotel and he took us there, however before we even got out of the van a well dressed man came up to the van and said "I'm very sorry, this hotel is all booked up, did you have a reservation?"

When we informed him that we did, he offered to have the van take us to another hotel owned by his company. We made the mistake of not going into the hotel ourselves, and the van took us to the other hotel, where they tried to convince us they were owned by the same company and the facilities were the same. They did not look the same as the picture we had seen on the website! So we told them that we had to go to the ATM before registering and we left to seek out our original hotel. No surprise but when we found the correct hotel, it was not affiliated with the other hotel, and did indeed have our reservation. We promptly marched back to the other hotel, grabbed our things, and left without paying. What a rip off! It's a common enough scam, but it was a little more involved than we'd ever heard of before. Our original hotel though was lovely and we derived an inordinate amount of satisfaction from having caught the scam before we had handed over any money.

The next day, we traveled by motorcycle taxis through the Old Quarter to visit Hoa Lo Prison, better known in the West as the Hanoi Hilton, where American POWs were held during the Vietnam war.






Senator John McCain's flight suit is on display, along with displays explaining how well the American POWs were treated despite their crimes against the People.

Shortly thereafter, we learned another popular Vietnamese scam - the rigged taxi meter. While metered taxis are supposed to take the headache out of arguing over every fare, at least some of the drivers in Hanoi have tampered with them so that they run much more quickly than they are supposed to. We caught on when we noticed a fare meter notching up kilometers about twice as fast as the car's odometer.

The scams continued from there, as did the pushy vendors, touts, and taxi drivers, to the point that it was all but impossible to trust anyone in the entire city.

Hanoi is not without its charms, however:



Hoan Kiem Lake is located next to the Old Quarter. It is home to an ancient and important temple, erected in memory of the man who drove the Chinese out of Vietnam.

We finally determined that the best way to tolerate the noise and ignore the con artists was to drink a dollar's worth of beer:



So we spent an evening sitting at a busy intersection in the Old Quarter, drinking 12-cent beers and watching the mayhem.



The next day, we visited Ho Chi Minh's Mausoleum. His preserved corpse is stored here nine months of the year, despite his explicit request for cremation. (He makes an annual pilgrimmage to Russia for "maintenance" during the other three months).

Here is the Mausoleum, in all its Communist architectural glory:



That evening we went to the water puppet theatre. Water puppetry is a Vietnamese art form originally performed in rice paddies during the wet season. It is hard to explain, so here is a picture, and a video.