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Millennium City
Striding confidently into the 21st century, Hanoi remains a community anchored to its past, harboring a rich artisanal heritage and intellectual life.
And there’s never been a better time to visit; after all, it’s not every year that a city celebrates its 1,000th anniversary.
My first impressions of Hanoi were shaped while on assignment in 1992 for an American newspaper. Back then, the government imposed a nightly 10 o’clock curfew across the capital, by which time my prison-like hostel was in lockdown mode. Desperate to make an after-hours deadline, I went over the compound’s two-meter wall one night and skulked though the shadows up Ngo Quyen Street to the Hotel Metropole. Save for a lone, squeaking cyclo pedicab, it was dead quiet.
In that pre-Internet age, the grand old colonial-era Metropole was the only place in the city—indeed in all of northern Vietnam —with an international fax machine. This was also the pre-MasterCard age in the socialist republic, so I forked over US$50 in cash to the hotel’s concierge—the going rate to transmit two handwritten pages—and thought to myself: There’s no capitalist quite like a Communist.
Flash forward to 2010, and Hanoi is a city transformed. Cyclos have been largely replaced by fleets of air-conditioned taxicabs. Fax machines still exist, though even the humblest guesthouse has Wi-Fi. The range of bars and restaurants—everything from nouvelle Vietnamese to gourmet fusion and authentic tapas—has expanded dramatically, as have lodging options. The Metropole, now run by the Accor group under its luxury Sofitel Legend brand, has grown nearly four-fold, to 364 rooms; a lavish new InterContinental overlooks the 800-year-old Golden Lotus Pagoda from its perch on Ho Tay, the city’s largest lake; and there’s even a sleek, boutique-style property, the Mövenpick Hotel Hanoi, catering to business-minded travelers.
Story by Christopher R. Cox Photographs by Martin Westlake
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