BEIJING - HA NOI

Km travelled 16942

10.11.08

This morning is incredibly hot inside the cabin. The train has been going fats all night. Until now we seemed to have crossed an endless periphery of tower blocks, with clothes hanging outside together the air conditioning. Now all you can see from the window is rice fields.
Early in the afternoon both sides we see crowds of tall buildings, bars to all windows, I remember the movie “La stella che non c'è”. What we are looking at is perfectly shown in the movie, plus is a masterpiece so if you haven't seen it you should watch it.
Outside towns and cities is all green now that we're going south, and dotted with ponds here and there. Smoking chimneys line up in the background. One of
our next travels will have to be around China. Mike is reading the last page of his book (Ecstasy) and a Danish girl took the place of the Chinese man that got off at the last station.
A white moon is already high in the blue sky and far away the last thing you can see is a line of green mountains, funny shaped. It's a never-ending day. At around 8.00pm we arrive in Nanning. This train, as it is, stops here. We can leave our luggage in the compartment but we have to get off, all the carriages will have to be detached and a new train put together. On the platform we follow the carriage attendant with a small group of people, all the ones that are not yet at the end of their journey (all foreigners).
We are left in a waiting room with large yellow armchairs where other people are already waiting. Outside in the dark, in a small artificial pond, some people are feeding bread crumbs to giant goldfishes. They're beautiful, each one very different from the others, all trying to swim on top of the others above the water to catch something to eat.
We spend some time there and, when we're lead back to our train, only three carriages are left. Not a lot of people are going to Vietnam. In fact now we're more westerners than chinese.

11.11.08

We get to the Chinese border at about 1.00am. We're all sleepy when the police come to ask us for our passports. Apart from giving it to them we're not asked for anything else, fortunately, so soon we are back to sleep.
We arrive at Dong Dang when it's almost 3.00am. This is the worst bit, because we have to change train. We take everything with us and we get off. There's fog outside and is damp. We fill in the immigration forms and give our passports. We also have to have our temperatu14620re checked for 2 yuan (that we have to borrow from other people, 15p to be precise) at the quarantine office.
When almost everyone is already on the train, Michael is still waiting for his passport to clear. They let him skip the customs and we quickly walked together to get our place on the train. Assigned seats don't matter any more, everyone gets into the first free compartment. We share it with Ron, a very nice Canadian man. I guess in his 50s, travelling on his own between China and Vietnam. We talk a lot with him, about our travels, our lives, our places. His daughter studied architecture too, but she works as a pharmaceutical project manager now. He's got a curious accent, you can tell his language is French.
We managed to sleep a few hour and when we wake up Vietnam is shining under a wonderful sun. Rice fields are filled with water, the vegetation is rich and bright. In Ha Noi the train slips between the small building like if it's cutting its way through. We wish good luck and say goodbye to Ron; we decide to walk to our hotel. The streets are crowded with scooters and people. It's incredibly noisy, in a way that we will never complain any more about our cities.
It looks genuinely asian and incredibly tropical. We get to our hotel where we receive a very friendly welcome, and we go for some breakfast while we wait for our room to be ready.
The centre of town is quite small and we already met many tourists.
When we finally have the pleasure of taking a shower and getting changed, we are ready to face a day out exploring the city. For today it will be enough to have a look at the Old Quarter.
We walk for the narrow, chaotic streets trying to get confident. The pavements are crammed with goods from the shops and people sitting at tiny tables eating and drinking. The road is an endless wave of scooters honking at regular intervals of one second. We soon learn that unless you jump in front of them, they will avoid you, almost every time. Every street has its own business, food, clothes, hardware, furniture.
For lunch we give ourselves a present by going to Mediterraneo, a nice Italian restaurant. Michael can finally fulfil his need of ravioli! We sit in the balcony so we can keep an eye on the life flowing down below.
In the early afternoon we walk around Hoan Kiem Lake, a very peaceful area in the middle of the Old Quarter where strangely all the city noise can't be heard.
North of the lake there's the famous Thang Long Water Puppet Theatre. We buy to tickets for the first show. While we wait for the time to come, we have a walk along a street where they sell only shoes. It seems like the police is filling bags with all the counterfeit stuff exposed outside the shops. The girls in their own shops are running laughing and trying to take everything off the pavement and out the back of the shop.
Unfortunately the curious show with water puppets lasted only forty minutes for us, after which, both of us had to run downstairs to the toilets probably victims of lunch or breakfast! The show lasts one hour so we can say we got most of it! At this point we thought it was better to head off to the hotel with rumbling stomachs, and get some rest to the end of the day, hoping that tomorrow will be better!

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