Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince in Vietnamese was already in Hanoi's bookshops in October. This, together with the bright autumn sunshine and the sweet apples from the hill-station of Sapa, confirmed for me that Vietnam is no longer an isolated Marxist state and former war-zone, but is again what it long was under French rule, one of the most charming destinations in all Southeast Asia.
People who are fond of Vietnam often debate the relative merits of Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) and Hanoi. My first experience of the country was of Saigon, and I instantly fell in love with it. On a recent trip to the north I found Hanoi's charms simultaneously more obvious and slower to make a deep impression. Saigon was the lush southern bloom, I decided, Hanoi the shy northern blossom.
Hanoi is a lot smaller than Saigon. Ostentatious colonial buildings proliferate, but they don't constitute the essence of the city's attraction. Instead, Hanoi is characterized by its lakes and its unique Old Quarter.
The lakes begin with the large West Lake, dominating the area many expat-riates live in, and site of the Sheraton hotel and a fine lake-side swimming-pool. Ho Hoan Kiem (Lake of the Recovered Sword) is right next to the Old Quarter. It has a picturesque island with an old temple on it, reached by a low wooden bridge and accessible during daylight hours. Trees have been encouraged to lean and dip their branches into the water and this, plus the winter mists that gather on the water's surface, has made the lake beloved of Hanoi's poets and photographers over the decades.
The Old Quarter is extraordinary. It's reminiscent of Fez or Marrakesh in Morocco, a maze of narrow streets each named after a particular trade, with traders still following that pattern. But as well as the silversmiths, bamboo-workers, tailors and the like, there are also tiny Parisian-style bistros and wine-bars, as well as small-scale hotels, that are largely unchanged from the French era.
It's one of the characteristics of Communism in its pre-reform phase that little gets altered. There was nowhere in Western Europe as quaint as Poland in the 1980s, and there are few places as fascinatingly old-fashioned in Southeast Asia today as Hanoi's Old Quarter.
In size Hanoi is eminently user-friendly. You can walk in 15 minutes from the Old Quarter to the Opera House and adjacent Sofitel Metropole, the city's classiest hotel. Take a look inside the Metropole -- it's one of the great Asian hotels and just about everyone famous who's been to Hanoi stayed there, even though there were still rats running around as late as the early 1990s when author Justin Wintle visited.
Today, though, the Metropole is sumptuous indeed, but in a French rather than an American manner. Catherine Deneuve and the entire film crew stayed there during the making of Indochine, and Bertrand Russell made it his Hanoi home while researching his War Crimes in Vietnam, published in 1967 when he was 95. Unfortunately, many more such crimes were waiting to be committed after that date. But then, war itself is a war-crime.
The Old Quarter teems with bargain accommodation. I found the Sports Hotel (tel: 84-4-9260-154; 96 Hang Bac) clean and trustworthy at US$12 a night. I heard one story of another hotel's manager taking a guest's deposited valuables home "for safe keeping," then telling the guest he couldn't remember how much cash there had been. The Sports Hotel will certainly not present you with that problem, and you can even rent a DVD-player from them for US$2 a day.
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