Nguyen Phan Binh bundled his wife and 9-year-old son onto the back of his motorcycle and drove 1,100 miles from southern Vietnam to take his place in line.
Vu Quoc Khuyen, as he does every year, pedaled his bicycle a few blocks across town to do the same.They joined thousands of Vietnamese who travel each day to a stolid marble mausoleum in Hanoi's Ba Dinh Square to pay homage to the country's late leader and beloved father-figure Ho Chi Minh, whose embalmed corpse lies inside.
Nearly 25 years after Ho's death, and long after most of the world's other communist heroes have been discredited or fallen into disfavor, the mausoleum has become a pilgrimage site for more than 750,000 Ho admirers a year.
To most Vietnamese, even those too young to remember when he was alive, "Uncle Ho" is still regarded as a saint and the inspiration behind re-unification in 1975 and the defeat of U.S.-backed South Vietnam.
"The dream of any Vietnamese is to visit Hanoi and come to see Uncle Ho," said Binh, who traveled seven days up Vietnam's dilapidated Highway One to make the visit.
"I wanted my son to see him, to know about his life," he said.
Visitors line up early and walk quietly in a single line through the square - where Ho declared Vietnam's independence in 1945 - before entering the mausoleum.
A pasty-looking Ho rests inside a darkened chamber, three ghostly spotlights illuminating his face and his hands, which are cupped along his thighs.
"Nothing is more precious than independence and freedom," reads a quotation from Ho on an outside wall. Several Vietnamese are in tears as they leave.
"Each time I see him I am very moved," said Khuyen, a Hanoi union official who visits Ho every year. "I try to think about what he contributed to the country and his many sacrifices."
Ho, whose wispy goatee beard and serene smile can be seen on official portraits in millions of Vietnamese homes and on everything from the currency to government buildings, was known for his austere lifestyle.
His two-room house is preserved behind the mausoleum. Shunning the huge French-built presidential palace nearby, he ran the country from a small wooden house on pillars.
"His life was very modest. He lived like the ordinary Vietnamese, so people can find things in common with his life," said Pham Cong Khanh, an official at the mammoth concrete Ho museum that opened next to the mausoleum in 1990.
His rejection of the trappings of power and his closeness to the people is a key to his continued popularity, a Western diplomat said.
"He was a guy who was one of them," he said. "He lived simply, and he cared. He would never have been one of the big guys driving by in a limo."
The diplomat said Ho was also viewed as more of a nationalist than a communist, making it easier for his popularity to withstand the changing winds of ideology.
When Vietnam celebrated the 103rd anniversary of Ho's birth in May, the country's entire leadership, led by Communist Party General Secretary Do Muoi, paid their respects by filing past his corpse.
The daily Hanoi Moi reported the number of visitors to the shrine rose to 711,000 in 1992, up from 534,000 in 1991. Foreign visitors doubled to 28,000.
Vietnamese students are given extensive lessons on Ho's life, learning how he founded Vietnamese communism and led the country to victory over French forces at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.
He died in 1969 but remained the inspiration behind the war waged by communist North Vietnam and its southern guerrilla allies against the U.S.-backed South Vietnam, which ended with the capture of Saigon - now Ho Chi Minh City - and unification of the country in 1975.
"He is the father of our nation, the father of all Vietnamese," said Ngo Ngoc Quang, a 19-year-old electronics student making his third visit to see Ho.