The Hanoi
Train Street is a narrow alley in the Old Quarter of Hanoi where trains squeeze
their way past houses, cafes and shops.
The track was built by the French in 1902 and is still an active route
today. It became a popular tourist
attraction where people sit at a café, enjoying a drink while a train passes within
feet of them. In 2019 it was shut down due
to safety concerns with one incident where a train stopped within meters of a
woman on the track who was taking pictures.
Luckily it reopened in 2023, partly thanks to pressure from the local
businesses who would like to cash in on the tourist trade.
On
recommendation from our Canadian friends whom we met in Chiang Mai at the
Lantern Festival, Gary and Karen, we found the Hanoi 1990s Café where they were
a few days earlier. The owner or manager
of the café welcomed us and sat down at a little table on the opposite side of
the tracks from the establishment, waiting in anticipation for the 3:30 pm
train. The cafés post the times of the
trains and there are a handful in the evening, but just this one in the
afternoon, so all of the coffee shops were filled with eager tourists.
Arriving on Train Street.
We found our seats at Hanoi 1990s cafe.
Naomi being served an egg coffee, while I decided to try an "egg beer"...first and last one I'll have...
Pouring my egg beer:
Cheers!
Okay, back to your regularly scheduled beer...
Before the
big event, numerous tourists, including us, took their photos while standing on
the tracks, or even placing a table and chairs to sit down and have a toast between
the tracks.
Posing for a pre-train photoshoot.
Naomi's turn to model solo.
This was the owner, or at least manager of the cafe. She was full of energy, took photos of many tourists and got everyone pumped up.
Most patrons were on the cafe side of the street, opposite from us. Their tables are being collapsed so they don't get hit by the train!
Looking the other way down the track.
Then it
happened in the blink of an eye…the train came rolling down the track, faster
than we anticipated, whished by us and was gone. Wow!
It was pretty intense and super cool to see.
Here it comes!!!
Choo-a-Woo!
Yup, it was pretty close...hard to tell here that it's moving by at about 30 km/h.
What do you think Naomi?
The waiter placed three of my beer caps on the tracks before the train arrived. They were squashed flat like a pancake...I could only find two of them.
Almost as
quickly, people paid their bills and were headed off. The next train wasn’t until after 7 pm, when
there were actually four trains within an hour.
We couldn’t wait for that as we were meeting up with Gary and Karen to
see the famous Hanoi Water Puppet Show and then go out for dinner. This long, but amazing day wasn’t over yet.
The Hoa Lo
Prison was constructed in the late 1800s by the French colonists in Indochina to
house political prisoners. Later it was
used to imprison US POWs (primarily aviators) in the Vietnam War. The name “Hoa Lo” means “fiery furnace” or “Hell’s
hole”. Sounds lovely doesn’t it? A lot of the prison was demolished in the 1990s
to make way for some high-rise apartments, but what was left has now been
turned into a museum.
I'm ready to go for the audio tour...I'm smirking as I sent this to Naomi as she getting her hair done, and she hates audio tours.
The audio
tour started in the “Maison Centrale”, which is French for Central House. This is where the dangerous and long sentence
detainees were kept. Two long platforms
lined the long sides of the rectangular room which served as the beds for the prisoners. At the inner side of the platform were iron shackles
for the legs of the prisoners and at one end were two very rudimentary toilets. It was definitely not a pleasant place to be.
The main door to the "Maison Centrale" (Central House) which was reserved for those who were considered dangerous or had long sentences.
The exhibition in the Maison Centrale.
Here's what it looked like...terrifying conditions.
The men would have one leg in irons most of the day.
This was the toilet at one end of the cell...no privacy at all. There were just buckets underneath and if the prisoners were unruly, the guards stopped emptying them for a while. But the political prisoners used this to their advantage and hid documents inside the buckets.
The Dungeon, where prisoners who broke regulations were kept for sometimes weeks at a time. Inside there was barely any light. The inmates legs were alway bound in stiff shackels with the floor sloping slightly downwards so if they lied down, blood would go to their head so they often returned puffed with oedema. They were always chained up and would have to relieve themselves where they were lying.
The number
of convicts in the prison rose from 460 in 1913 to over 2000 in 1954. The inmates were held in subhuman conditions
to say the least. When the Democratic
Republic of Vietnam was founded in 1954, the prison was converted to an
education center for revolutionary doctrine and kept as a reminder as to the incredible
sacrifice the political prisoners had made and the terrible mark the French had
left on this country.
A memorial to the political prisoners.
This elm tree was a place of respite, where they could sit in the shade on hot days and relax.
A replica of how some prisoners cut through iron bars in the sewer to escape...imagine how terrible those conditions would be.
A cell for women, and their children if they had no extended family to take care of them.
The actual guillotine that was used in the early days of the prison. One day, 7 prisoners were killed in under 5 minutes.
The death row prison cell.
With the
outbreak of the Vietnam War, American prisoners of war were incarcerated at the
prison, which was later dubbed the “Hanoi Hilton” by its occupants. The first prisoner arrived in 1964 and the jail
was in use until the end of the war.
Air defence in Hanoi during the Vietnam War.
An aerial reconnaissance photo from 1970.
The prsion garb of the first US pilot who captured and placed in the Hanoi Hilton.
I found it
interesting that the Vietnam War exhibition section really tried hard to paint
a picture that the prisoners were treated very humanely. They were well fed, allowed to play games
like checkers, chess and cards, exercise regularly and were never treated badly. Well, if you do some research, that doesn’t
quite seem to be the case. A famous incident
was when POW Jeremiah
Denton was on a televised press conference which he was forced to
participate in by his captors to state to the World how well he was being
treated. Feigning that he was having
trouble with the bright television lights, he blinked T-O-R-T-U-R-E in Morse
code.
John McCain's flight suit and parachute.
He later became a senator and ran for the US presidency a couple of times.
This was on the walk back to the hotel. In the bottom right corner, the green box is a product from Schneider Electric, the company that bought Power Measurement, where I worked in IT from 1997-2010. Check out whose running the store...yup, that's a duck!
Yesterday Naomi and I flew from Chiang Rai, down to Bangkok
and then over to Hanoi. We were much closer to Hanoi from Chiang Rai,
but that’s just how the airlines work sometimes. There were no direct flight to Hanoi. Chiang Rai’s airport is relatively small since
the city’s population is only about 200,000.
Before coming on this trip, I applied for a multiple entry visa for
Thailand for my Canadian passport. I was starting there and flying back four
months later from Bangkok. However, I
would also be visiting Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Canadians need a visa for Vietnam, which only
costs $25 USD, but UK citizens do not require a visa. Since I hold a British passport, I decided to
forego the hassle of applying for a visa and enter Vietnam on that
passport.
Naomi passed through immigration without any issues but me,
not so much. I gave the officer my Canadian
passport so that I could get an exit stamp in it, and then he asked where my
visa was. I presented my UK passport which
was what I intended to use entering Vietnam.
For some reason, he told me that this was an issue and that I had to use
the same passport that I entered Thailand with to go into Vietnam. This didn’t make sense to me. I’ve switched passports before when traveling
from Panama to Colombia, without any issues.
I was told to have a seat while Naomi stood dumbstruck on the other side
of immigration.
An older, female immigration officer came out and started
asking me questions. She also told me
that I had to use the same passport to leave Thailand and enter Vietnam. She then instructed me that I needed to have
a plane ticket out of Vietnam, so I reluctantly fired up my laptop and
purchased a ticket from Ho Chi Minh City to Phnom Penh on the spot. This was all a bit stressful.
Eventually I was allowed through immigration only to find
out from Naomi that our plane had been delayed by an hour, which was going to
make our connection in Bangkok tight which was now stressing her out. However, since it was the same airline, they
delayed the flight from Bangkok to Hanoi to make sure everyone could get on
board.
Flying towards Bangkok:
So lesson learned, never bother trying to use the “better”
of the two passports that I possess…just be Canadian and deal with visas if I
have to, except perhaps when I visit England.
In the end, the immigration officer in Vietnam didn’t even talk to me
and didn’t look for the Thai stamps so I entered the country under my UK
passport. I will have to figure out how
to change back to using my Canadian passport before re-entering Thailand after
visiting Cambodia and Laos. A problem
for another day.
Driving into the old city centre of Hanoi in a taxi, we
crossed over the Nhật Tân
Bridge which looked really impressive, especially lit up in the night. We could definitely tell that we were in a different
country. First off, where were the
7-11s?!? There were a few massage parlours,
but they were certainly not as ubiquitous as in Thailand. Almost all signs on buildings were in
capitalized letters. I joked with Naomi
that whoever made the signs was either lazy (keeping Caps Lock on) or very
angry.
We knew that traffic in the capital city was chaotic, but it
was still a bit surprising. Lanes and
traffic lights didn’t seem to exist in the old city. When the taxi driver dropped us off at our
hotel, he was kind enough to guide us across the street as scooters whipped by. The secret is to be predictable…just keep
walking and don’t go backwards. Over the
next day and a half, we got the hang of it.
On our one full day in Hanoi, we tried to pack a lot in, so
we were up early. After breakfast at the
hotel, we took a Grab taxi to the Ho Chi Minh
Mausoleum in Ba Dinh Square. Ho Chi Minh is
considered the father of modern-day Vietnam.
He was the founder and first president of the country. After he died in 1969, even though his wishes
were to be cremated, his body was embalmed and a mausoleum was built in between
1973 and 1975. Over 50 million people
have visited the mausoleum since, which is free to visit.
Our hotel in Hanoi:
Naomi and I arrived at the entrance which was very well organized. Staff organized visitors into 6-8 single file
rows as we proceeded through security, like at an airport. The lines joined together after that and we
shuffled along for about 500 meters, at first under a covered walkway but then
out in the open, making our way towards the mausoleum. One had to be dressed appropriately (no
shorts, bare shoulders), no bags or cameras were allowed, and you had to keep
quiet and moving forward.
School kids lining up at the mausoleum.
And so are we...
Soldiers dressed in pristine white uniforms were located
along the way as we approached the building.
They were also situated by the entrance and four guards stood at each
corner of Ho Chi Minh’s glass case. It
was quite a site to see. He was lying
there under a dull, orangish light with his hands on his chest. Crazy to think that he died a few years
before I was born, yet here he was, still preserved. Well at least we think it’s actually him…who
knows if it was a wax figure as keeping a body intact and presentable for that
long must be a challenge. Supposedly the
mausoleum is closed for two months every year as he is sent to Russia for “maintenance”! In fact, there are a number of Communist leaders
who have become “Communist
Mummies”: Lenin, Stalin (for a while,
then he was buried), Mao Zedong, Bulgarian
leader Dimitrov, Kim Il Sung and the most recent one, Kim Jong Il.
Here are some pics I found online of Ho Chi Minh in the mausoleum:
Outside the mausoleum, after we had been inside.
You can see some soldiers in their white uniforms in the distance.
It sure had a communist feel to the place.
Checking out some Ho Chi Minh swag.
This girl was sweet. Naomi was looking for a fridge magnet for her mom and the girl was very helpful, spoke great English and her math on the prices was good too. She took care of the whole sale for her mom who was behind the counter.
Back outside, we wandered around the grounds of the Ba Dinh Square
which included the One
Pillar Pagoda that was originally built in 1049! We opted not to go into the Ho Chi Minh Museum
as we had too many other items on our itinerary, so we started to walk towards
our next stop.
The One Pillar Pagoda.
A nearby temple.
I'm looking towards the Ho Chi Minh Museum.
This sign was hilarious. It is trying to convey idealogies of Buddhism, but in a modern way.
This one says:
CAUSE: Revealing the country's or someone's secrets causing serious consequences.
EFFECT: Brings rebirth as a dumb person suffering from miserable conditions.
CAUSE: Creating computer virus creating harm to others.
EFFECT: Brings an insane and foolish person.
And this one seemed appropriate to us!
CAUSE: Wasting time on travelling for fun.
EFFECT: Brings mobility problems when blessing ends.
In front of the Ho Chi Minh Museum.
A cute girl near the exit with her "Insta-pose".
Less than a kilometre away, we entered the Temple of
Literature, which should really be called the Temple of Confucius. It was old too, built in 1070. We went there due to the architecture of the
ancient buildings which were lovely. By
chance, there were many graduating students there getting their photographs
taken with their proud parents looking on.
It was a great place to take pictures, that’s for sure. Actually, Naomi was getting blown away by how
much Hanoi in general was a photographer’s paradise.
Walking to the Temple of Literature.
All the shops on this street sold tools, but some of the architecture was interesting.
An old building that looked like it was going to be restored.
Crossing the street, commentary credits to Naomi:
In the Temple of Literature.
Ho Chi Minh looking a bit beatnik-ish.
Doing my best Samson impression.
One of many graduates.
Trying to stay out of the way of the proud parents.
I love the spontaneity of this photo that Naomi captured.
This little girl was super cute, dressed up like a little dragon.
Her mom was singing "Baby Shark" to keep her motivated for the photographer.
On our way back to the hotel.
We wandered through the ground for less than an hour and
then headed back to our hotel where we split up.Naomi wanted to find a salon to get her hair
coloured while I went to visit the Ho Loa Prison, also known during the Vietnam
War as the “Hanoi Hilton”.I’ll split
that into the next entry as this one is long enough!
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