Our first day of planned tours was meant to include visits to four “craft villages”; parts of Hanoi that specialise in local handcrafts including pottery, silk, noodles and woodcarving. Unfortunately (and annoyingly) for us, despite booking us onto this tour, our operator neglected to mention the impact that Tet would have on the proceedings. Despite everything being closed, our guide did manage to recommend some other activities which actually proved to be just as interesting (and probably a lot less expensive, thanks to the lack of gift open gift shops).

We visited the Pottery Village, where we got to see workers hand-manufacture all manner of different ceramic products from start to finish. Always impressed to see people with actual skill and talent creating things from scratch, it would’ve been rude of us not to buy something from the as-ever strategically placed shop (which we did.)

The first of our impromptu schedule alterations led us to our first pagoda visit at Tran Quoc, on the east shore of Ho Tay. From what I gathered, Pagodas in Vietnam are very different to Temples in China, in that they are mainly Confucionist as opposed to Buddhist, and are active places of worship; this seemed to bear out at Tran Quoc, as the place was teeming with people.

After a light lunch, we visited the Museum of Ethnology; Vietnam is made up of around 54 different ethic groups, each with unique and diverse cultures which where well represented here. Most impressive was a housing exhibition, showing full-size replicas of the traditional housing built by villagers.

Our last port of call was the Silk Village, another remnant of our original tour. The factories where closed, so we didn’t get a chance to see any silk being made but Emma did get to try her hand at a weaving machine. She seemed to have a knack for it, and after a few minutes of tuition she was churning out the beginnings of a silk cloth; I sense a possible career change in the future…