Hanoi *Pics to follow

Hmmm. What can I say about Hanoi?

erm... oh yes.

NEVER COME HERE.

The rest of Vietnam is the most beautiful place in the world: this is the total antithesis. Here's me before I realised the disapointment yet to come.

What an utterly horrible place. The traffic is terrifying, it smells, it's full of pickpockets and everyone is trying to rip you off every second of the way. and pretty much all of the people are rude and unpleasant. Here's just an average road junction:

The heat yesterday was almost unbearable. About 40 degrees, and really really humid, but very sunny. Walked round the lake in the centre which admittedly is quite pretty, and visited the temple in the middle of the lake, which was just about worth the 30p entrance fee, but only because there is the embalmed corpse of a giant turtle of a species which is supposed to inhabit the lake, in a big glass case.

And its one bloody big turtle, I can tell you. It's all to do with a legend surrounding the city which has to do with a 15th century Emperor Ly Thai To, who got a sword given to him from heaven, a sword with which he beat the Chinese out of Vietnam. A day later, a giant golden Turtle grabbed the sword off him whilst he was out boating on the lake, and took it back to it's right ful owners in heaven. So it's known as Ho Hoan Kiem which means Lake of the restored sword.
Anyway. It was considerably more realistic than the "Corpse" of Ho Chi Minh which we went to see this morning for about 5 seconds. Apparently it goes to Russia for 3 months every year for restoration work, however, if that's still him, I'll change my name to Madam Tussaud. Here's the mausoleum from the outside.

They make you walk round it at a pace that olympic speed-walking atheletes would feel smug about, and you are shoved from behind by men in overly dramatic military dress uniforms if you pause for a nanosecond. You are made to leave your cameras at a booth about a mile from the actual mausoleum and you have to do a lot of walking around open ground on specific walkways for no apparent reason. It's also raining today. Well sort of mizzling.. and a bearable temperature, but it just means that instead of being soaked with sweat, you're wet with rain.

Anyway, after that didn't much feel like seeing his house, or anything else here; so far, if being kind, I would say that the phrase that sums this place up so far is "is that it?"...i won't go any further than that in case my blog's being monitored by the authorities, as seems likely here as your whereabouts is constantly monitored also.

Found out that the house sale has just fallen through, so rather than going back down the Vietnam and back through Cambodia, I have just booked my Flight to Bangkok and as I don't want to stay in this city for any longer than I possibly have to I leave tomorrow night.

Bunch of total Arse.