After hiking through the villages in Sapa, I wanted to know more about the minority groups of Vietnam, which the Museum of Ethnology is great for. The museum decor is pretty basic and features mostly glass displays of the various examples of tools and materials used by the different ethnic groups, but still fascinating nonetheless. Given that there are 54 ethnic groups, the coverage of them is very cursory, but it gives you a taste of what you might see if you spend more time at some of the villages. There are some videos demonstrating the different crafts but the video quality is pretty poor and it has no audio or is in Vietnamese. The outdoor section was pretty cool as they actually built full sized replicas of different buildings -- and to make the buildings as authentic as possible they actually requested the minority groups to come in and build these structures. It takes a 30 min cab ride to get there as it's on the west end of town, so you might want to start with the museum and work your way back into downtown Hanoi.

We visited the museum of ethnology on the morning of our last day of Vietnam and the timing was perfect. Since we had already spent time in the minority areas, it gave us a lot more context to appreciate what we saw in the museum. This isn't the Smithsonian though it is quite nice - clean, friendly and well kept.

Simply great!