Ho Tay — West Lake — is enormous by urban standards: 500 hectares, with a shoreline of 17 kilometres. It sits just north of the Old Quarter but feels like a different city. The diplomatic quarter occupies its eastern shore, and the restaurants and cafes around its edges attract a different crowd from the tourist circuit of the center — more Vietnamese families, more expats who've been in Hanoi long enough to find their way out here. The water is not beautiful in any conventional sense, but it has scale and light in ways that Hoan Kiem, for all its charm, doesn't.
The lake is best experienced by bicycle or on foot along the Thanh Nien road that separates it from the smaller Truc Bach Lake to the east. Tran Quoc Pagoda juts into the water from a peninsula on the southeastern shore. The northern shore is lined with upscale seafood restaurants that fill at weekends with Hanoian families. At dusk the light over the lake can be exceptional, and the breeze makes it significantly cooler than the city center in summer. In the mornings, the running and cycling track around its perimeter fills with locals exercising.