Never, never, never get your Hanoi train ticket from the smiling lady who has the travel concession in the Vietnamese passport control building. True to her word, the minibus with the screaming banshee did pick us up from the hotel (our earlier telephone call may have helped in this) and she did meet us at the station with some train tickets. However, not until we boarded the train two and a half hours later, did we find out that our soft sleeper tickets where in fact hard sleeper tickets. We don't mind hard sleeper but when you pay extra for soft sleeper you want soft sleeper. Added to this, even though we had middle bunks, a Vetnamese family had moved in to them (mother, baby, grandmother, small child and two able bodied middle aged men) and
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