Ho down in Hanoi

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So the total journey from Hong Kong was 32 hours to Hanoi. The train to Guangzhou and change on to a sleeper train to Nanning in South West China to catch a bus to Hanoi. Arriving in Nanning at 8am, instead of the scheduled 6am, my first mission was to find somewhere to buy a bus ticket to Hanoi. My first attempt had me in a travel office offering me 300 RMB for a ticket (£30) but while I went to the cash point I noticed the official bus station ticket office and was offered 150 RMB (£15). Welcome back to China I thought, I did miss the constant attempts to rip you off. It just wasn’t the same in Hong Kong. I took the cheaper bus ticket, which included the taxi to the bus station and waited in the departure hall with the ‘My Heart Will Go On’ instrumental playing over the speaker system.

The bus left at 10am with a few westerners on board ad we headed to the border. As we approached the sun came out and it was hot! The first point in my trip where I could say this was tropical and how I’ve been waiting to say it. At the “Friendship Gate” I had to get through Chinese immigration, which wasn’t as easy as I had hoped for. I have two passports (UK and Malaysia) and so far I’d been travelling on my UK passport which had my Visas for Russia, Mongolia and China. However as Malaysia is part of ASEAN (The Southeast Asian version of the European Union) I could use my Malaysian passport and not need a visa for Vietnam. So when Chinese immigration took my UK passport, asked me where my Vietnamese visa was and I explained me having a Malaysian passport too, alarm bells must’ve rung as this started some questioning as to why I had two passports and also meant some time spent in a holding room. By this time the other tourists on the bus had passed through Chinese immigration onto Vietnamese immigration and thought I might be getting the rubber glove treatment. Luckily it never came to that and after 20 minutes or so I got escorted to the front of the queue and got an apology and some nice chit chat with the immigration officer who wasn’t so friendly in the first instance. Vietnamese immigration by comparison was a breeze if somewhat a bit of a frenzy. You filled out the forms shoved your passport through a hole with a crowd of 15 people jostling to get to the front and waited for them to stamp and then call your name. But I’d made it through a less than normal border crossing and was now in Vietnam in tropical weather.

The bus arrived in Hanoi at about 6ish and I had to make it to my hostel I had pre-booked. I took a taxi with two Swedish guys, Jonas and Jakob, and we headed off in a tiny tin can of a car with a driver who agreed a price and then begged for us to give him some more money. Cheeky bastard! The Swedes and I ended up hanging out for most of our time in Hanoi, eating, drinking and partying. Or favourite spot was Bia Hoi, a shack which sold cheap beer for 3,000 dong (less than 10p) served on stools a foot high with company in the likes of rats and cockroaches. Nothing to keep you on your toes than a rat brushing past your feet. My birthday was spent in a cool bar with the Swedes and Amy a girl they had met in Beijing and Ashley a guy she had met in Beijing. A chilled night with beers and sheeshas, a good birthday. I met up with Colm and Simon, the guys I met in Guilin, for a drunken night drinking jam jars of Vodka Red Bull. It wasn’t a particularly wise move as at 7am the next morning I had to be on a bus to Halong Bay and the jam jars had snuck up on me. Needless to say I wasn’t very well when I went to bed and when I got up and also halfway through the bus journey. I didn’t really do much else in Hanoi other than the ‘Hanoi Hilton’ a famous prison used during the Vietnam War where John McCain was imprisoned. I do regret not going to see the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum as I could’ve made it a hat-trick of dead communist leaders in glass box. I did go to Halong Bay with Jonas and Jakob, which was a 3 day tour with one night spent on a junk boat and the other on Cat Ba Island. Despite the weather being much cooler than it had been when I arrived in Vietnam (max 12C) there was good visibility and the bay wasn’t hidden by mist. We also had a venture to some caves, which were mediocre at best. Jonas and I were the only ones to brave the cool waters and took a night time swim jumping off the top of the boat (a 3 storey jump). On Cat Ba Island we climbed the peak for views of the whole island, climbing a rusty tower which had survived wars, barely! We also went to Monkey Island, home to some vicious monkeys who actually bit a guy on the leg after he tried to take his bag of peanuts back from the ground. Back to Hanoi and bye to the Swedes after a night of beer pong as the next day I was heading off to Hue further south while they were heading over to Laos. Maybe I’ll see them again on an island in Thailand.

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Photos

The Friendship Gate
It wasn't so friendly at first!