Below Belief

Installed in the “Stars Hotel”, Hanoi, we feel jubilation at having made a relatively complex journey without hitch. Thinking about it, back home we’d never even dream of attempting to take a four hour bus journey (from Newcastle to London, for example) just four hours before a flight from, say, London to Paris. Our audacity impresses even us.
The Stars Hotel was selected rather randomly from the book and is fine but is also curiously dually named the Prince Hotel. There are at least 3 other Prince hotels marked on our map in the streets surrounding us and we begin to see a pattern of copy-cat hotels and cafes. Presumably as soon as one hotel does well and gets a good reputation, duplicates crop up in the vicinity in the hope of picking off confused tourists. The number of mock “Sinh Cafes” in Hanoi is just incredible.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 31st, 2004 at 10:40 am and is filed under Vietnam. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.