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Published: October 21st 2008
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Days 48 - 51 (Saturday 18th October - Tuesday 21st October). Had to get up really early on the 18th to get to our coach to the border. Coach journey was almost unbearable. The humidity was ridiculous and you couldn't sleep as the driver opted to drive with his horn again. It took about 2 hours to reach the border and from there we had to go through 5 or 6 checkpoints before being allowed to cross. They varied in strictness. The first one involved just everybody holding our passports up as we drove slowly passed and the last one we had to slip Y5 (about 50p) into our passports or they may charge us Y100 (10 pounds). In between was the usual paperworks to fill out. The whole process took about 3 hours but this was nothing compared to our times stuck on the trains at the Russian and Chinese borders.
Hanoi is our first stop and is absolutely manic. Every street is clogged with scooters and bikes, people's shops sprawl out onto the pavements so you have to walk in the road aswell. Our hostel is great and had been well recommended but the first thing i noticed
was so many Westerners and i didn't like it. It felt more like a holiday resort and already i'd rather be back in China. We arrived in Hanoi quite late so the first night we just went for a quick stroll and to find some Western food. It took about 45 minutes for us to order as we we tried to request something in English for Lin who is Chinese, to a Vietnamese waiter! Back at the hostel that night Adelle announced that she is going home. She hadn't been too happy for a few days and so has decided to fly on ahead to Singapore before deciding whether or not to carry on to Australia.
The next night we went to a street bar where you can get a beer for 3000VND. That's about 15p! The currency here is ridiculous. It's about 28,000VND to 1 pound. I withdrew 2,000,000 on arrival! At the street bar we sat playing drinking games with an Australian girl, 2 really hairy American guys, and Jacquiline who is from Scotland and who is going to join us for our trip down the east coast. Even Lin joined in, her english has improved massively
in 3 days. At the beginning we'd just read road signs together, pretty soon i think we'll be ready for a conversation!! She left for Hue a day before us where we are hoping to head next but there's been reports of serious floods in that direction so we may have to re-evaluate. At the moment we have booked on a 5 stop bus route which will take us all the way to Saigon in the south. This whole route cost only 25 pounds.
There are plenty of excursions from Hanoi but i opted out due to costs. Sorry to disappoint but the routine here was really just sleep and drink! On the last night i headed back to the hostel relatively early as we had a long coach trip the next day, only to find a woman sitting outside in tears as she'd lost her boyfriend and they had an early flight home the next morning. She was worried he'd been kidnapped or was in trouble and wanted to try and find him so we wandered the streets and the lake for a couple of hours only to return back to find he's just sneaked off to use
Me, working as the locals do
Don't ever do this, they charge you a lot for the privelage! the internet for a few hours!! Because of this i had no sleep so on our last day i just stayed in bed. Tonight we head to Hue and it's a 12 hour journey.
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