There’s such a lot of world to see

Getting on the night bus from Hue heading for Hanoi we should have known it was too god to be true. For ages we were going great guns. We were having actual fun (unknown on night buses), with the five of us (Doireann, Rich, Elaine, Red and me) laughing away, taking wicked photos of sunsets, and me showing off my party trick (fist in my mouth. Yes, I do have a very big mouth indeed). After a rest stop, we were all stretching out and preparing to get some much needed sleep, at about 1am, when suddenly the bus stopped. Doireann, who was sitting on the backseat, came up to me and told me to move from where I was sprawled over two seats. I refused, naturally.

“Well, there’s about 30 people getting on the bus, and there’s not 30 free seats left on the bus, so either I sit next to you, or twelve other people get in this seat.”

“I don’t care. I have my ipod on so I can’t hear anyone, and my eye mask so I can’t see anyone. They can’t move me if they can’t wake me”.

“Seriously, look.”

I looked. She wasn’t exaggerating. Grudgingly, I sat up, and settled in for a long night of sleeplessness. I was a bit bemused when one of the newly arrived people got on and asked us to move further down the bus, as there were 11 people in their party who all wanted to sit together. I refused, on the grounds that there were 5 of us, who all wanted to sit together, and we were here first. Elsewhere on the bus, a guy who’d had a seat to start off with ended up lying down in the aisle. Six sleepless hours later, we rolled into Hanoi. My eyes felt as if they were going to pop out of my head with tiredness.

We bid a hasty goodbye to Rich, Elaine and Red, who were going off on tours of Halong Bay, and asked the guy in the travel agency where we’d arrived about booking a ticket on the night train to Sapa that evening. He made that sucky-teeth face that you often see being sported by plumbers and mechanics, and told us how very difficult it would be to get a ticket. However, he could arrange a soft-sleeper for us for $23. We’d looked it up in the Lonely Planet and knew it should cost about $11. While I wasn’t averse to paying a dollar or two commision, $12 seemed a little bit excessive. We asked about hard sleeper, and were told it was $19. This was plainly ridiculous, so we got motos down to the train station and booked hard sleepers ourselves for $7. I’d travelled on hard sleepers in China, so reassured Doireann that they were fine. No problem.

There was a problem, though, when we got back to the travel agent’s, where we’d left our bag. Obviously miffed that we hadn’t booked our tickets through him, he decided to get awkward. We asked him if we could take a shower there (they advertise that you can have a free shower if you travel with them). No, he told us, we would have to pay. OK then, what about leaving our bags there? Of course – if we paid $5 each. We could have got a (good) hotel room for that. We went into Western complainer mode, and told them that they’d lost our business for a three-day trip to Halong Bay (a lie, but they don’t have to know that), that I’d be writing to the Lonely Planet about them, and that we’d be putting all about them on the interweb. Now the first two weren’t strictly true, but the last one I can do. If you ever come to Vietnam, don’t travel anywhere with TN Brothers, Camel, or F Tours (all the same company). They are bad and mean people!

We stormed out in as much style as we could muster with our heavy backpacks on, and went straight to another travel agents, ODC, who we’d heard good reports of. The lovely lady there let us leave our bags AND have a shower, before we’d booked anything with her. To thank her, we booked a three day tour of Halong Bay, for the day after we arrived back from Sapa. We arranged to go back later that evening to pick our bags up for the train. We’d be there at 8.45pm – she closed at 9.30pm, all cool.

Feeling distinctly ropey, we spent the rest of the morning sitting in a cafe, recharging our batteries. We then decided to get a massage, to try and un-knot some of the muscles that had been going into spasm overnight. The chances of getting a good – legitimate – massage here in Hanoi are slim to none, so we went to a hotel recommended in the Lonely Planet. And what a waste of money it turned out to be. Very unprofessional – think I could have done a better job myself! Still, I fared better than Doireann, who had the last 10 minutes of her massage getting her hair french-plaited.

We were both feeling rotten by this point – in fact, I nearly keeled over out of exhaustion at one point – so when we passed by a supermarket and headed in for snacks for the train, we were on the verge of hysteria. This wasn’t helped when Doireann asked to see some moisturiser that was in a cabinet, only to be told that the lock had gone out. This was then added to when I upset a display of chocolate bars, to have the assistant come over, knock them out of my hand and sneer at me, “You have enough”. Oops. By this time we were bent double with laughter, so got out while we could.

It was nearly time to collect our bags, so we wandered up to the travel agents, noticing on the way that a big power cut that was affecting much of the Old Quarter. And we shouldn’t have been surprised, from our bad day, to see the travel agents doors firmly shuttered and closed. The day was going from bad to worse. We banged and yelled. And banged and yelled some more. Some people came to help us, and tried calling the number on the sign. No answer. More banging and yelling. The clock ticked by. I started mentally writing Sapa off, which I was gutted about – I was really looking forward to going. After what seemed like hours, with the train departure time getting closer and closer, someone eventually woke up the old lady who lives above the shop. She came down and unlocked the doors, we rushed in and grabbed our bags, and the two of us (me and Doireann, not me and the old lady) threw ourselves onto a passing moto – three on a motorbike plus bags is not an experience I want to repeat, especially as the driver saw it as his duty to get us there as soon as possible, despite me yelling in his ear to slow down, for the love of all that is pure and good and holy.

Still, we got there, with a little bit of time to spare. Looking through the window of the train, though, my heart sank a little bit more. Where the hard sleepers in China had been six bunks with mattresses, these were just wooden boards. There goes a chance of a decent night’s sleep. Still, I would be lying down, and that, after the day I’d had, would be a relief. I climbed up ungracefully, lay down, and didn’t move for the next 10 hours, at which point we rolled into Sapa.

Things could only get better.

After our emotional goodbye to the gorgeous family at Diem Diem, we crawled onto the 8am bus with a heavy heart.  Nothing we’d seen or done so far in Vietnam could come close to that; we were also in some kind of clothes-frenzy hangover.  Luckily we were surrounded by friends on the bus; Rich had caught back up with us again, and also with us were Elaine and Red, an Irish couple that Doireann had met earlier.

The bus was crowded, but at least we had a seat each.  However, when we stopped for a lunch break, I managed to jinx it with my very special kind of magic, and it refused to start again.  In a spectacularly sexist display (but for once I wasn’t complaining – it was hot out there), all the men on the bus push-started it until it suddenly revved up.  “Hmm, sounded like the starter motor” I mused, with all the sageness of one whose starter motor started going just before I sold my car.  To my mum.  And yes, I feel guilty!

Following this, the driver evidently decided it wouldn’t be a good idea to turn the airconditioning back on (and who am I to question his wisdom?), so we suffered for the rest of the journey in the baking heat, fanning ourselves silly.  The heat didn’t let up when we arrived in Hue – it felt by far to be the hottest place that I’d been to.  After wandering around for a while, we all managed to get rooms in the same hotel.  Tired from the early start and the bus journey, we didn’t do much more that afternoon and evening.

Except for one momentus happening.  We went for a meal at the DMZ Cafe, just round the corner from our hotel, and after an average spaghetti, I made a move that was to become legendary.  I ordered chocolate mousse.  I was only after a chocolate fix, but I got the most delicious dessert – rich, very chocolatey, and plentiful.  So plentiful that there was enough to go round the table and give everyone a taste, and soon everyone was swooning along with me.  A happy end to the day.

The next day, seven of us – Doireann, Rich, Elaine, Red, me and another couple whose names I can never remember – had decided to hire a private boat to take us down the Perfume River.  Not as swish as it sounds, it cost us less than $2 each and I guess you get what you pay for!  Having been stung on badly organised tour buses before, we thought this would be the best way to go – we were promised complete control of where we went and stopped.  Hah.  Fools.  As soon as we got on, they were shoving menus in our faces, telling us to pick what we were to eat for our (not included in the price) lunch.  Whatever we were choosing, though, wasn’t available, or would cost more to order.  Doireann, Rich and I decided not to bother, knowing that we’d get better value on land.  We then had a minor altercation with the boat driver (what’s the name?  I know there’s a better name than ‘boat driver’), who tried telling us where we were going to stop.  We put him straight, though, and told him to take us straight to the tomb of Minh Mang, who ruled Vietnam from 1820 to 1840.

The tomb was spectacularly big.  It was surrounded by lakes and various pagodas, and the king himself is buried under a big hill towards the back.  It’s a very peaceful resting place – definitely fit for a king!  The architecture there is very much in the Chinese style, and it’s hard not to notice the Chinese influences here in Vietnam now I’ve seen that.  I could have been back in Beijing.  Even all the colours are just like the Chinese classical styles.

Our next stop was at the Thien Mu Pagoda.  This was a surprisingly political site during the 1960s and 1970s – it was from this Pagoda that the monk Thich Quang Duc came from – he became immortalised by the world’s media as he burned himself alive in Saigon to protest against the President Ngo Dinh Diem.  Apparently the car that he drove himself to Saigon in is usually on display here – however, we couldn’t see it, as the Pagoda is currently being renovated.

Running from a sudden shower, we got back onto the boat for our final stop, the Citadel.  My only previous experience of a Citadel is attending a couple of concerts in the St Helens one a few years ago – now I’m a veteran of Citadels, I can safely say that St Helens is nothing like Hue.  The Hue Citadel is huge – the perimiter is 10km all round.  Hue used to be the capital of Vietnam, and the Citadel is a big reminder of that time.  Or it would be, had it not been blown to bits by various invaders and wars.  It’s a sad legacy of the wars, I guess, as it’s possible to imagine how spectacular it would have been in its heyday.  The Purple Forbidden City, like its Beijing counterpart, was reserved for royalty to flounce about in – regular commoners wouldn’t have got near.

We didn’t have long enough to explore the Citadel, as we had to dash back for yet another night bus.  Rather than walk back, we took our first trips in a cyclo (I’d taken a few in India, it was Doireann and Rich’s first time).  We spent the whole journey creasing up laughing and taking photos of each other – I was perched between Doireann’s legs, and Rich, in a separate cyclo, somehow managed to look like an invalid – the cyclo looked like one of those old fashioned wheelchairs, a bit like the one used by Clara in ‘Heidi’.

We’d managed to leave enough time for dinner before the bus arrived, and this time everyone ordered their own chocolate mousse.  This was only marred by Rich noticing the bus waiting for us down the road.  Elaine went over to investigate, and was told they’d drive round the block, then collect us – she came back looking not too happy, as the bus was chocka already.  Panicking, and yet not wanting to jeopardise our chocolate mousse (priorities!), we got them to put it in polystyrene boxes for us to take away.  And let me tell you now – sweating, carrying a heavy backpack, and trying to eat a chocolate mousse that’s rapidly melting – even the most accomplished multi-tasker would have trouble with that one.  I only wish I’d have taken a photo of us.

By the time the bus turned up again, we’d finished our chocolate mousse.  We were delighted, though, to notice that this was a different bus.  It was far from full, so we spread out over the back seats, looking forward to what promised to be, for once, a relatively pleasant overnight journey – we were with friends, the aircon was working, we had lots of room.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.  Things never turn out like you expect…

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