Seeing the Sights of Hanoi

My first afternoon was spent in Hanoi touring the city to see the sights with the two interpreters assigned to me, Mme Suu, and one of my own age, Nguyen Kim Anh. Hanoi has four lakes, many of them with parks surrounding them and we visited the Thang Nhat (Unification) park right in the centre of town.

Hanoi is a very clean city, much cleaner than the rubbish piles of Vientiane or the dusty, garish billboards of Bangkok with the huge Westernised features of the local film stars promising the most in exotic and exotic delight. Along the roads and above them are the red banners with socialist and patriotic slogans.

The most frequent were the famous dictum of Ho Chi Minh's that nothing is more precious than independence and freedom, celebrations of the victory in the South, the thirtieth anniversary of the proclaimation of the DRV and the principle of the leadership of the Lao Dong (the Viet Nam Worker's Party).

The next day I expected to be largely an exercise in sightseeing, Ho Chi Minh's Mausoleum, a static display in the art museum, a pagoda and the circus in the evening. I did not reckon with the pervasivness of politics in the DRV.

The mausoleum would probably have been frowned upon by Ho Chi Minh. It is an elaborate structure of elegant marble and rare timbers solely designed as the last resting place for the greatest of all Vietnamese patriots. Foreign visitors gain the non-socialist privilege of being able to jump the queue and join it at the main doors. Ho Chi Min's body lies with hands folded across the chest; red tinged light illuminates gently his serene face as he sleeps, his task complete. At his head two flags symbolise the two passions of his life: the crossed hammer and sickle of Marxist-Leninism and the single central star of the Vietnamese national flag.