Hanoi Beverage Festival Closes After Three Days and About 60,000 Visits
The three-day Hanoi Beverage Festival closed on October 11 at Astronomy Park in Duong Noi. Hanoi's Department of Culture, Sports and Tourism reported approximately 60,000 visits, with 60 participating businesses and organisations operating 70 booths offering tastings, demonstrations and cultural activities.
The festival is Hanoi's attempt to turn drinking into a tourism product. An October 6 announcement by the tourism department described plans for a Hanoi beverage map, with QR codes providing information about distinctive cafes, beverage venues and cocktail locations, and a target of developing one or two specialist beverage routes after the festival.
The longer-term idea is to connect those addresses with sightseeing, cultural activities and packages combining tourism, food and accommodation, and to promote visits to beverage-producing craft villages and processing facilities where visitors can learn about production, try selected stages, taste products and buy directly from producers.
Coffee is both Vietnam's national drink and a major export, and Hanoi's cafe culture is itself a tourism asset. For Chinese cafe and tea-shop owners in Hanoi, a working beverage map and themed routes would amount to an official channel of customer traffic. For now these remain plans; no public map address or complete route list has been published.
Source: GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：河内歌剧院旁咖啡馆的户外座区。摄影：David McKelvey，CC BY 2.0，来源：Wikimedia Commons
