Our Great Adventure: Day 51 8/11/2014

We decided to get our onward travel tickets sorted first, so we got up an hour earlier at 7am and had a tasty breakfast in the hotel. We noted the local bus station was 3.5km away and would take us most of the morning to get there and back to purchase our tickets to go to Cat Ba island. We had already lost a day in Hanoi due to the flight from HK been put back so noting the hotel only charged an extra $2 USD per ticket to buy and collect them we got them to do it. We then walked the 20 mins to the train station in order to buy our overnight train tickets for Hue, which was for the 11th when we got back from Cat Ba. They only cost $90 USD which didn't seem to bad and once we had sussed that we had to get a number to queue for the tickets (as per the Post Office process) it was all very easy! Then, as it was close by, we went to a museum, which was once the notorious Hoa Lo prison, nicknamed by the Yanks as the Hanoi Hilton. There we learnt of the harsh treatment the Vietnamese political prisoners received from the French when it was their colony in the first half of the 20th century. After independence in 1954 it fell into disrepair only to be used again in the Vietnam War to hold captured American airman, including Senator John McCain. We watched a film on this which was clearly biased but showed the scale and indiscriminate impact of the bombings, which certainly has similarities of how we felt about America when we were in Hiroshima. On our way back to the hotel to drop off our passports we walked round the Hoam Kiem lake and visited the island pagoda. We then headed north through the Old Quarter to go to Lake Tay Ho, stopping for lunch on the causeway. We walked back through the gardens next to Presidential Palace and went past the country's founding father, Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum, but we didn't visit as his body was on its annual trip to be re embalmed in Moscow, Lenin style! After catching up with our blog at the hotel we went for dinner at Madam Hiem restaurant, which was recommended by Simon's cousin, Sue. The menu was a mix of French & Vietnamese food set in a lovely courtyard to an old colonial building. We walked back via the lake which must have been breeding mopeds as the area was packed full of them; clearly the thing for Hanoi's youth to do on a Saturday night!