Getting lost in Hanoi’s Old Town
Summary
Hanoi gets a bit of a poor reputation, mainly because it has so many dour old communist concrete buildings on the outskirts and plays #2 to the vibrancy of Ho Chi Minh City. But the Old Town of Hanoi is a place that should definitely feature on an itinerary of Vietnam with its maze of lanes and what seems like endless places to pull up a small plastic chair, order a beer and just watch the mayhem go by. Might just be the most “classically Asian” spot I’ve seen
Top tips:
- Make sure you have some of the fresh beer at “Bia Hoi Junction” at the corner of P Ta Hien and P Luong Ngoc Quyen in the centre of the Old Quarter. It’s know as fresh beer because it’s made without preservative and supposed to be drunk straight away . . . so when in Rome
- Its worth heading over to the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum Complex
- Be sure to check out the evening water puppet show, which is a little touristy but still fun
- To see how Hanoi can fit into an itinerary for experiencing the highlights of Vietnam see this entry for more ideas – A 3 week itinerary for the highlights of Vietnam
highlights
#1 Pulling up one of those small plastic seats and grabbing one of the fresh Vietnamese beers as you watch the mayhem go by
#2 Checking out the surprisingly fun water puppet show
#3 Taking a trip to Ho Chi Minh's Mausoleum and its well set grounds
#4 Just soaking up the whole winding-streets-with-vines-hanging-over-as-motorbikes-go-zipping-past of it all. A fun spot to spend a couple of days
Experiences nearby
The below map shows experiences nearby with a colour that reflect the Overall Score of those experiences
Other Narrow Windy Street Experiences
Score Detail
Background - how many times have you asked someone what a travel experience was like and the response was "amazing" or "awesome"? That response is nice to know, but it makes it hard to differentiate that experience compared to others. That is exactly what these scores are trying to do - differentiate the experience by giving a score out of 10 based on 6 categories and then giving an overall experience score
This overall experience score is calculated by: take the highest of the "Culture" or "Nature" score (1-10) + "Fun factor" (1-10) + "Avoiding the crowds" (1-10) + highest of the "Unique" or "World Famous score" (1-10). Then convert into a score out of 100
Extra detail - the logic being that I find all of the 6 individual scores important, but I don't want to mark an experience down just because it doesn't cover both "Culture" and "Nature", or because it isn't both "World Famous" and "Unique". Take the examples of Safari in The Serengeti and walking through Rome - they both appeal at opposite ends of the nature / culture spectrum, and you can have a fantastic time without needing to appeal to both sides. So, their overall scores aren't penalized for their lack of one or the other, and I've done the same for "World Famous" vs "Unique". But . . . I do think that the "Fun factor" of an experience is important, irrelevant of other factors, and so is "Avoiding the Crowds" (or where there are crowds that add to the experience). So, both of these scores are standalone