A full 12-hour excursion took me on a 110-mile inland bus ride each way to the capital of Vietnam, winding through the countryside and small towns up the Red River to the city of pagodas and palaces, presidents and prisons. Welcome to Hanoi.

Our tour guide and host Kha, born in 1977, spoke candidly about the realities of North Vietnam. While once hosting a tour, Kha met American Vietnam War soldiers who had fought in the region. They expressed an interest in having conversation with fellow veterans they had opposed in wartime, so Kha arranged lunch for them to meet with his father, a disabled Viet Cong veteran. Lunch turned into seven hours of stories and memories that needed to be told and heard from both sides of the war.

Ho Chi Minh remains esteemed and honored as the “father of the country”, having lived a simple life as an example to the people. His preserved body still lies in state within an austere mausoleum where, every day but Monday and Friday, people pass by to view him in silent reverence. The mausoleum is only open until 10:00 am, when the line of devotees reaches the maximum for the day. Nearby is the Presidential Palace, built in 1900 to house the French Governor General of Indochina during the French occupation of Vietnam. When Vietnam achieved independence in 1954 Ho Chi Minh refused to live there, preferring his simple traditional Vietnam stilt house on the grounds surrounded by lotus ponds. The Palace is still used for government meetings, though it is not open to the public.

Hanoi has its share of temples, including the rebuilt One Pillar Pagoda and the sixth century Buddhist Tran Quoc Pagoda, considered one of the oldest pagodas in Vietnam, that sits on a tiny island on the eastern shore of Tay Ho or West Lake. The peaceful Temple of Literature or Quoc Tu Giam, is a Confucian sanctuary and historic learning center as the oldest university in Vietnam.

In the middle of the city, now huddled beneath towering skyscrapers, lies what little remains of the sobering Maison Centrale, originally built by the French to imprison oppressed Vietnamese. Its walls capped with embedded broken glass chards, it is most remembered by Americans as Hoa Lo Prison, nicknamed the “Hanoi Hilton”, where the Viet Cong captured and cruelly tortured American pilots during the Vietnam War. One of it’s best known POW “guests” is Senator John McCain, who spent five and a half years within it’s walls, some of that in the “Cachot”, a section of small, dark, isolated, rooms for solitary confinement that still smells of mold and urine.

After a stroll through several blocks of the lively Old Quarter Market, we loaded back onto the bus for the 3-hour drive back to port…. time to contemplate the contrasts and disparities of the day and bid Hanoi farewell.

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