A Glimpse of Hanoi (L, G)

• Pick up at your hotel, you’ll have the whole day to explore Vietnam’s capital city.
• You will first visit Ho Chi Minh’s Mausoleum, his simple stilt house where he lived and worked, and the museum dedicated to his memory and the nearby One-Pillar Pagoda. You will then visit the Temple of Literature, the first university in Vietnam dating back to the 11th century. After that, you will drive to the excellent Ethnology Museum for an overview of Vietnam’s 54 distinct ethnic groups.
• After lunch, you will call in at the serene Tran Quoc Pagoda, the oldest in Hanoi, on the banks of Hanoi’s Ho Tay (West) Lake. The centre of Hanoi, including Hoan Kiem Lake, the Ngoc Son temple and the bustling Old Quarter, is a magnet for visitors – it’s noisy and hectic, but definitely a ‘must-see’ attraction. The Old Quarter is a maze of shopping streets and restaurants with a hotchpotch of architecture – traditional tube houses, religious buildings, artisans’ workshops and cottages, colonial houses and modern concrete edifices.
• In the evening, you’ll have tickets for a performance of traditional Water Puppetry (an art form unique to northern Vietnam, and a good, light-hearted introduction to its rural culture).