8 · The water puppets
Thang Long Water Puppet Theatre sits on the road that curves around the north shore of Hoan Kiem Lake, on the edge of the Old Quarter — about five minutes' walk from where most of our tours pass. The show runs several times a day and lasts three quarters of an hour, and it fills up. Book a day or two ahead in season.
The name is literal. The stage is a square pool of waist-deep water and the puppets move in it, not above it. Puppeteers stand behind a bamboo screen and work the figures on long rods while live musicians and singers carry the story, which comes out of Vietnamese village legend rather than anything written for tourists. It is louder, funnier and stranger than the brochures suggest.
9 · Dinner at Old Hanoi
Old Hanoi occupies a colonial building on Ton That Thiep, a side street in the Old Quarter that most visitors walk past. The chef trained to a level you would expect to pay four times as much for; the seven- or eight-course set menu is the way to order.
The kitchen's signature is Vietnamese-style barbecue ribs. The tamarind prawns and the spring rolls are the two other dishes our guides mention unprompted. It is a good place to end a day that started with street food, if only to see the range Vietnamese cooking covers.
10 · The Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum
The granite memorial on Ba Dinh Square holds the body of the man who declared Vietnamese independence on that same square in September 1945, and it is treated with real solemnity. Visitors queue in silence, phones and cameras stay outside, and shoulders and knees must be covered.
The hours are narrow: closed Mondays and Fridays, open 08:00 to 11:00 from November to March and 07:30 to 10:30 from April to October, and closed altogether for several weeks late in the year for maintenance. If Ba Dinh is on your list, it has to be the first stop of the morning — which is exactly how our half-day and full-day routes are built.