Day 63 (26th July) Hanoi to Ninh Binh
MIRACLE. Today shattered my scepticism about miracles. It started badly because we got up early to go to Ho Chi Minh’s Mausoleum which the internet (bollox alert) told us was open to 11 am. When we got there at 10 am in the overpowering heat and humidity, we found that it was closed because, as a young English tourist told us, it closes for 2 months a year for the body to be re-embalmed. Including July. So we decided to make the best of a bad job and go to the Ho Chi Minh Museum which was very interesting. The most interesting parts were his personal effects, such as his white suit and his sandals, and his French period with pictures of the things and people which inspired him in Paris in 1921. I found it sad that he lived to be 79 but died in 1969, six years before Vietnam’s final victory over the Americans.
We then got a taxi to the bus station where the internet (got it right for once) says buses leave for Ninh Binh. The taxi driver quoted us a price of 200,000 dongs but wanted 300,000 when we got to the bus station. There was a bit of a discussion and I went to a nearby ATM to get some more money, by which time he had driven off. Jennifer then realised she had left her handbag in his taxi, complete with passports, credit cards, phone and power bank. We got a taxi back to the Museum in the forlorn hope of finding him in the taxi rank, but no such luck. Some very helpful taxi drivers said they would retrieve the handbag for us, but the problem was we didn’t know anything about the driver, his car (I couldn’t even remember its colour) or his taxi company. We assumed the handbag was lost for good and a priority was to cancel her credit cards and phone. So we went back into the Museum and sat in a cafe. While Jennifer tried to reach the Halifax on her ipad, I was struck by a strange urge to go back to the taxi rank. On the way there, one of the drivers came running up to me burbling something about “found it”, and then our driver appeared with the handbag in his hand. He told me via Google Translate that he had spent an hour driving round the bus station trying to find us, but got a hunch we might have gone back to the taxi rank.
We then got back to the bus station and got a minibus to Ninh Binh, a city (which appears to consist of a collection of villages) 60 miles south of Hanoi on the edge of the Red River Delta. The driver found it hilarious that we hadn’t booked a hotel, but took us down some narrow lanes to the Trang An Garden Homestay, which we are thoroughly enjoying.
Changing the guard at the Mausoleum
Statue of Uncle Ho
Ho as a young man in Paris, when he was still known as Nguyen Ai Quoc
The section on the war against the Americans
His suit
Strange tree outside the museum