If you go to Vietnam by airplane, you will most likely arrive either at Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) or Hanoi. I chose to fly to Hanoi simply because it sounded much more attractive on paper, and actually discarded Ho Chi Minh from my schedule entirely. It sounded too noisy and obscure for my kind of travel destination. I arrived in Hanoi early March; this means it was still theoretically winter time, not-too-cold not-too-warm weather with cloudy sky (that is way you’ll see most of the pictures with a grayish kind of light). All in all, Hanoi was a very pleasurable city to visit; it is culturally, gastronomically and artistically interesting and has many alluring places to visit: some of them beautiful; some of them quite clever; some of them outright strange. It is a place that will certainly surprise you in many ways.
If you would like to read more about this elegant and unique oriental city go to my second article of the Vietnamese series "A Visual Guide to Hanoi, Vietnam's Capital".
