We arrived in Hanoi after a rather long series of flights. Hanoi, with 8.7M citizens, is the second largest city in Vietnam. We spent the night at the Lotte Hotel. The next morning we were bussed to Ha Long Bay to east of Hanoi. On the way to Ha Long Bay, we stopped at a cultured pearl factory. A World Heritage Site, Ha Long Bay contains thousands of 500 million year old Karst structures. We took a four hour boat tour of the bay. We spent the night at the Vinpearl Ha Long Bay Resort. It was quite exceptional in that the hotel's reception was on the mainland, but the hotel itself was on a nearby island to which we were transferred by boat.

Following Ha Long bay we returned to the Lotte Hotel in Hanoi. In Hanoi we visited the Hoa Lo prison famous as the Hanoi Hilton, which housed American prisoners during the Vietnam war. ?We also visited the Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum built to honor the man frequently called the George Washington of Vietnam. On the massive grounds of the mausoleum are the presidential palace, several residences of Ho, the Vietnamese Parliament and the One Pillar Pagoda. After the mausoleum, we visited the Temple of Literature (aka Tomb of Confucius) which housed the Vietnam University from 1076 to 1779. The next day (Nov 26) we flew to Siem Reap, Cambodia. En route to the airport, we visited the Ethnology Museum, which focuses on the 54 different ethnic groups in Vietnam. The grounds contained a number of artifacts and structures showing different aspects of Vietnamese life.

As common in all the countries we visited, Christmas decorations are everywhere. Southeast Asians celebrate Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas for commercial reasons and not necessarily for any religious reasons.