Nine o'clock, hotel lobby
Leonie Hafke and her friends were downstairs and ready before we were through the door, which is a good sign for a day that involves a lot of walking. No warm-up needed — we started straight into the Old Quarter.
The Old Quarter, street by street
Three stops carry most of the history in this part of town.
| Stop | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Bach Ma Temple | The oldest temple in the city, and the guardian shrine of the eastern gate. |
| 87 Ma May | A restored merchant's house — the clearest example anywhere in the quarter of how a tube house is laid out. |
| 48 Hang Ngang | The house where Ho Chi Minh wrote the Declaration of Independence in 1945. |
Some of the group had read up on Vietnamese history before arriving, which changed the whole tone of the morning: the wartime part of the story became a conversation rather than a monologue, and they took a lot of photographs of the architecture.
Lunch, coffee and a church
We walked to Ly Quoc Su for pho — the single dish everyone expects from Hanoi and one of the few that lives up to it. They said so repeatedly, and between bowls we ended up trading notes on how our two countries eat.
St Joseph's Cathedral came next. The group were all Christian, so a building most guides treat as an architectural stop turned into the part of the day they remembered. Then the weekend walking street, with a stop for egg coffee, which is invariably either the best or the strangest thing a visitor drinks in Hanoi.
French Quarter, then Ba Dinh
The Metropole and the Opera House to see what the colonial city looked like at its most confident. After that we took a taxi to the Ho Chi Minh Complex — the Mausoleum, the garden, the Presidential Palace, the stilt house he chose to live in instead, and the One Pillar Pagoda.
The stilt house is usually where the day lands. It is a very small house next to a very large palace, and it makes a point about the man that no plaque manages.
Goodbye at the lobby
Eight hours together and nobody was in a hurry to leave. We swapped Facebook accounts and promised to visit each other, which guides say often and occasionally mean.