Capital of Capitalism: Hanoi
(Writing from Ahmedabad, India)

We have arrived safely in our new home after three days of travel -- Luang Prabang to Coup-land, Bangkok to Delhi, and early this morning Delhi to Ahmedabad. I am as always behind on the blog, but I'll post a few updates today. Bella tells me her voice will return to the blog in the next few days with some reflections on the trip.

More than any other place we visited, Hanoi left us feeling swindled. For the bus ride from Ninh Binh (Ninh Binh Ninh Binh!), our guest house had told us to pay 30,000 (about $2) Vietnamese dong per ticket, but the driver charged us 35,000. Worse, we watched another passenger pay with a 50,000 dong note and receive 20,000 in change. Bella and I hadn't slept well, and the two previous full days of sightseeing had drained our energy -- so we chose not to complain about the $ 0.31 per person overcharge. But this was the first of a thousand small insults from which our exhausted tourist immune system failed to protect us.

We had assumed the bus would drop us in front of a guest house in the old city, as we'd come to expect from each previous bus journey. Instead, the bus stopped 7 km south of the city center, and we had to fend off the pressing flesh of dozens of moto drivers as we retrieved our bags from the trunk. One persistent entrepreneur followed us for three blocks, vigorously negotiating with himself a ride to town from 50,000 dong to 20,000 dong until he finally accepted our repeated refusals. We looped back into the bus station to regain our bearings, and finally took a taxi to the guest house we'd chosen (after 10 minutes of haggling to the rate suggested in our guide book). At the guest house, our pretty and fast talking host booked us 3 nights at the hotel, 2 day trips, and flights to Vientiane before our thoughts caught up with us. We had enough wits to shave a dollar from the room rate, and 20% from the day trips -- but that night we found plane tickets for $25 cheaper. And we'd already paid for them. When we visited the Vietnam History Museum that afternoon, we felt as if our pockets had been picked by each hand of this gorgeous wooden statue of Shiva.

So against my own promises, I wasted a paragraph of my life with complaints. But in my own defense, these complaints do illustrate the profound difference in atmosphere between Vietnam and Laos -- more on that later.

And in defense of Hanoi, the city does offer one of the best museums we saw in South East Asia. The "Museum of Ethnology" lucidly teaches about the 54 ethnic minorities of Vietnam, and they've built lifesize reconstructions of different tribal houses in their courtyard. We liked this exhibit of a bicycle carrying fishtraps, accompanied by a photo of a man in a conical hat actually riding this thing.

We also visited Ho Chi Minh himself in his mausoleum, preserved like Lenin in waxy perfection.