Say Hoa Lo to my little friend

Sometimes you can learn too much about a country and lose those initial, innocent, ignorant impulses you might have had back when you weren't burdened by knowledge and experience.

I was in South Korea for over a month before I remembered 'oh yeah, this is that place they're supposed to eat dogs,' and it wasn't until my sixth day in Vietnam when I visited Hoa Lo Prison - which the incarcerated United States Air Force POWs sardonically nicknamed the 'Hanoi Hilton' - that I recalled 'oh yeah, there was that whole war thing...'

It's not like I hadn't seen 20,000 terrible films about it, all admittedly from the American perspective (though rarely with a positive outlook about the whole thing). So I was keen for the chance to redress the balance and see events portrayed from the other side of the conflict.

Though I wasn't quite prepared for the level of selective editing involved. This museum's white-washed trip down memory lane is the most darkly amusing cover-up I've seen since I visited the Korean DMZ and learned about the North's childish excuses when they were caught digging infiltration tunnels to the South. I may not be a historian, but my dad's a farmer and I know the smell of bullshit.

The twenty-seven deadly Sinhs

As a child, I remember eating Asda Take A Break and Puffin chocolate bars, their cheeky own-brand knock-offs of Kit Kat and Penguin respectively, and wondering how they were getting away with that. It turns out they didn't get away with the second one after all, because there are rules to stop opportunists cutting in on someone's market niche when they've built a solid reputation over many years.

Those laws don't exist in Vietnam though, and when one particular Hanoi-based travel agent called Sinh Cafe was singled out for its good value deals and relative lack of scamming by the writers of those bulky Lonely Planet books that so many people insist on carting around even though it's 2012, it didn't take long for every other travel agent in the city's Old Quarter to steal its name and branding in a successful bid to trick gullible tourists into thinking they were dealing with a credible business.

I was looking for a good travel agent to book a tour of Ha Long Bay, and because it's 2012 I got some help from the internet. This is apparently the real Sinh Cafe website (now rebranded as The Sinh Tourist to set itself apart from the imitations), and I was told there were at least 15 dodgy knock-offs in the Hoan Kiem district alone. Walking around that area in search of a book shop, I counted at least 27 Sinh Cafes, and I wasn't even really looking.

Here's a needlessly thorough gallery. (Note: Does not include real Sinh Cafe).

The tortoise hunter

They're pretty big on tortoises in Hanoi, which is good as I'm pretty big on them myself. They carve stone effigies in their universities, cultivate mummified specimens in their temples and there are even legends about giant ones swimming around in the impractically small Hoan Kiem Lake. Oh hang on, that'll be turtles if they're swimming won't it?

Ah well, same thing, innit? Like saying 'monkeys' when you mean apes, or 'Chinese' when you mean anyone east of Bangladesh. Same thing, innit? No, it isn't. Get out of my sight!

Hello there Vietnam, how are you this morning? Good.

I think I'd been postponing Vietnam so long for the same reason as China, as I didn't fancy having to arrange an annoying and expensive visa when other countries let me in with just a passport stamp. It's nicer to feel welcome than like I'm some sort of annoyance (Hanoiance?)

But I'm glad I finally got round to it, as this might be one of my favourite South East Asian countries as well as one of the worst. Great sights, fantastic food and the most mental traffic I've experienced since Cairo. Those idealised images of Vietnam you have from 1990s travel documentaries of people in conical hats getting around on non-motorised bicycles are long gone. Hanoi's population of eight million owns six million motorcycles. That means everyone apart from the kids has one, though they probably have illicit scooters stowed beneath their beds.

I didn't enjoy walking in Hanoi very much, but risking almost certain death crossing the street was still preferable to getting ripped off by taxi drivers. If these blogs suddenly cease before I get to Ha Long Bay, you know what happened. Please give my organs to the needy and let the medical students make mistakes on my corpse so they don't slip up on living ones. As a precaution, I've always had a blog post scheduled to go live in the event of my death with more details - that's normal behaviour, right?