On the street outside the hotel, there were more scooters than I'd thought there were in the world. On the sidewalks, people sat in little groups on 10-inch-high red plastic stools, cooking and eating. Women in conical hats carrying loads balanced on bamboo poles walked the streets, stopping now and then to respond to text messages. Tourists bought $2 t-shirts and green army hats with red stars on them. There were red banners with yellow lettering hung across the streets, and there were frequent large posters of Ho Chi Minh.
My hotel in Hanoi had great breakfasts and a shockingly inexpensive minibar. The Vietnamese are doing well at capitalism, but they haven't worked out that the point of the hotel minibar isn't to make a steady, reasonable profit, but to mercilessly gouge rich dimwits, sleep-eaters, and people in diabetic crises.
Three times I tried to go to the Ho Ch Minh mausoleum, and only on the third try did I have the timing right. The mausoleum visit didn't go as smoothly as I would have liked First, I tried to carry a backpack when I should have checked it, and a woman 30 feet away barked at me through a megaphone. Then a guard snapped at me to take my hands out of my pockets as I was waiting on a staircase in the mausoleum (we weren't actually in Ho's presence yet).
Ho had apparently wanted to keep his funeral low-key, but they buried him like a pharaoh. His mausoleum is a large, greyish structure very roughly resembling a Greek temple. He's in a glass case in a surprisingly small interior room, and you walk around three sides of him. The mausoleum is staked out by guards in very crisp white uniforms. I made way for a column of eight of them on the sidewalk. They bent their elbows as they marched, which made them look like they were kicking off a number in an old musical.
Next to the mausoleum is the Ho Chi Minh museum. There was a large bronze statue of Ho, and an enormous poster of Ho, and every now and then an elderly Vietnamese man in traditional clothing would pose solemnly with one or the other, and tourists would surreptitiously try to get a picture of him. Artifacts included Ho's sandals and Ho's chest expander. Displays were more concerned with the war against the French than that against the Americans. There were also peculiar displays of modern art that probably had some kind of carefully-worked-out symbolism that I couldn't spot. A lot of anti-fascist European art of the 1920s and 1930s was reproduced; there were, for example, large sculptures of figures from Guernica hanging from the ceiling.
Outside the museum, an old Vietnamese man in sunglasses chased me down. He was a scooter driver named Hoang, and he thought I looked like a man who would be interested in the Museum of Ethnology -- it was a bit far, but it was worth it. Later, it would turn out that he usually had an argument for going to more distant places over nearby ones. He had laminated photocopies of travel guides that he would whip out and wave around in support.
When he learned I was Canadian, he pulled out a letter of recommendation, written on the back of a business card, from a professor of social work at the University of Quebec. I'd said no, and was walking away while this was going on, but I started to come around to the idea. I decided that being part of the scooter traffic would probably be less dangerous than continuing to cross it on foot. Also, if I gave in now, it would encourage him to keep nagging tourists who'd already walked away, and I'd score a point in the game of 'make things as bad as possible for all future travellers' I've been playing.
It probably means my life lacks excitement, but riding around Hanoi on the back of a scooter was kind of a blast. I started using moto taxis to get around generally. I tried to stick with drivers who were middle-aged, on the theory that if they'd reached that age driving a scooter around Hanoi, they were either relatively sober non-maniacs, or were protected by supernatural forces that would probably keep their passengers safe, too. Thinking of it now, it's also possible they were driving xe om because they'd driven their tractors off cliffs or lost their jobs at the demolition derby for recklessness.
On my last day in Hanoi, I went to the Hoa Lo prison, the 'Hanoi Hilton' of the (American) Vietnam War. There really is a Hanoi Hilton now, of course; it's called the 'Hilton Hanoi Opera Hotel'. The Hoa Lo prison has been turned into a museum. Most of it was dedicated to the period when the French ran it, but there was a small display on its use as a prison camp for American POWs. Turns out it was kind of like summer camp, but with more singalongs and better sports facilities. Photos show a merry-go-round of volleyball, movie nights, mail calls, and regular medical checkups. A pretty startling bit of old-school propaganda, the Hoa Lo prison museum.
