Last days in Vietnam

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Getting from Sapa to Hanoi was a bit of a mess. No, that's kind of exaggerating. There wasn't anything major going wrong, just little annoying moments that I could shrug off.

From Sapa to the Lao Cai bus station I should have been able to catch bus #2 which goes the whole way and only costs 30,000 Dong. The bus didn't stop for me. I wasn't sure how often they came - probably every half an hour - so when a mini-van to Lao Cai came along I took that instead. It cost 50,000 but the lady assured me they went to the bus station, so I didn't worry about the minimal difference in price. But the van didn't go to the bus station. It stopped at the train station (about twenty minutes from the bus station). I could have caught a city-bus the rest of the way, but there were some tickets agents there selling buses for Hanoi for 280,000 so I just took one of those.

The bus was another mini-van, which was fine, but the agent didn't hand me the ticket until I was already on board. It said 210,000, meaning they had added on their own 70,000 fee, but it was too late to argue about that. Then the van wasn't what I was going to Hanoi in - it was just transport to the bus station where everyone transferred into a regular sleeper-bus. In effect I had paid 120,000 Dong to get from Sapa to the Lao Cai bus station instead of 30,000. Not impressed over that.

I had booked a couple of nights at a place called French-styled House. I had been going to go back to the Hoan Kiem Hostel in the Old Quarter but this place was only $1.50 more and instead of a little windowless cell I got a huge room in a fancy house with really nice owners. It isn't anywhere near the Old Quarter so I'm not sure how suitable it would be for regular backpackers. For me it was fine because I was only back in town to go the zoo and then to the airport the day after, and this place is actually more convenient for both.

I had checked the directions for getting from Hanoi's My Dinh bus station to the property so I wouldn't get lost. Last time I came into Hanoi to My Dinh (from Tam Dao) the bus had dropped me on the roadside, but only a few hundred metres from the station - you know, despite the destination for the bus actually being the My Dinh station! You can't see the station from down the road of course, so that was mildly confusing, but it got sorted quickly enough. I was sort of expecting the same thing here, except this time it wasn't a couple of hundred metres, it was about a kilometre away! By complete coincidence, the place they dropped me was the very road I needed to get to the French-styled House. I did not know this, though, so walked all the way to My Dinh which was the "start-point" in my directions.

Once at My Dinh I looked for city-bus #5 which didn't seem to exist, and got put on bus #70A instead. Five minutes later I arrived right back where I started. Nuts. I think the conductor ripped me off as well, because he charged me 10,000 whereas the last bus I caught from My Dinh (to the Old Quarter, which took an hour) only cost me 7000. I had shown the conductor the exact address so I could get dropped as close as possible. When he said this was where I get off I jumped off all ready to walk a short distance. He had dropped me about two kilometres from the street I needed. Another long walk! Sigh.

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The next morning I went to the Hanoi Zoo. City-bus #32 leaves from just around the corner from where I'm staying and goes right past the zoo. The stop where I got off had road-works in progress, so I was working my away round them while trying to find the entrance to the zoo. As I walked past the entrance to a temple I could hear gibbons calling, and the path went along the shore of the small lake where I knew the zoo was located, so I went that way. After a couple of minutes I found myself inside the zoo without having gone through any of the gates. The zoo is a mix of animals and amusement park rides. At first I wasn't even sure I was in the zoo. I figured it would be confusing for the staff if I tried to go and pay at one of the entrances, so I just let it go.

I had heard that the Hanoi Zoo was not a good zoo and so, given that I hadn't thought much at all of the Saigon Zoo, I wasn't all that eager to rush to see it. But I'm glad I did because while it could best be described as "average" it is, I thought, actually better than the Saigon Zoo. It's always better to see things for yourself and make up your own mind.

The zoo is part amusement park, not in two separate parts but all meshed together so that rides and fun-houses and trains are just scattered all through the grounds between the cages. There's a lot of noise, but I guess the animals are used to it - none seemed stressed or even wary. I visited on a Sunday and it was quite busy but not crowded. Lots of people wanted to take their photos with me.

The zoo is divided into three parts. The first part that I saw was mostly birds and is perfectly acceptable. The second part is on an island in a lake and is mostly macaque cages which are really grim and not at all acceptable. The third part is for all the other mammals, which have enclosures ranging from acceptable/average/okay to fairly poor. Overall I'd describe the zoo as "pretty good" - not great but not horrendous, with very few terrible cages. In general the animals seem better housed than the majority of animals at the Saigon Zoo, although there are several notable enclosures at Saigon which are considerably better than anything at Hanoi, either in size (e.g. Saigon's cage for Annamese silvered langurs) or in general (e.g. Saigon's gibbon island).

An unexpected bonus from the zoo visit was a lifer mammal, with an Asian house rat in one of the masked palm civet cages. I've probably seen these before - I have seen black rats in several southeast Asian cities - but in Vietnam the true black rat (Rattus rattus) is restricted to docks and harbours whereas the common urban species is the Asian house rat (Rattus tanezumi), so I can add it safely to my life list.

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Random observation time:

*I don't think I have ever seen so many sturgeons as I have in Vietnam. They are in tanks outside restaurants everywhere. I'm assuming they are pool-bred somewhere.

*When movies and programmes are dubbed into Vietnamese for tv, they just lower the sound and talk over the top of the original dialogue, so you can hear both at once which is distracting in so many ways. And they generally just have one person doing all the dialogue which must surely make it difficult to follow the story? Imagine, say, Captain America: Civil War or Batman vs Superman with every line read by one Vietnamese woman.

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Leaving Vietnam:

When it came time to book a flight out of Hanoi I looked originally at Air Asia, which is the airline I generally prefer to fly with, but their site kept giving error messages that day so I went next to Jetstar. They had a flight from Hanoi to Bangkok for about NZ$6. Brilliant, I thought. Then the taxes and fees went on and it came out at over NZ$70, and that was still before the check-in baggage was added! I looked at Vietjet and their prices were about the same - I think Jetstar just uses the same Vietjet flight for that part of their route. The next day I went back to Air Asia's website. They had a flight for about NZ$12, but again the added fees brought it up to a price similar to the other flights. So I settled on Vietjet, mainly because I wanted to fly on a "new" airline (not that I keep an airline life-list!), but also because it was a better time, getting into Bangkok at 1pm rather than 11pm. It totalled out at about NZ$94.

As usual, the security checks at the airport had their own little quirks. Everybody had to take off their shoes and belts to put them through the X-ray machine - and this time I even had to put my cap through the machine, whereas normally they just get me to take it off when going through the metal detector. And yet a half-full bottle of water in the side-pocket of my bag went through without comment.

I've lost so much weight on this trip that my trousers don't even stay up without the belt - I literally have to wear the belt as tight as it will go now. You know how sometimes you see those people wandering the streets after escaping from crooked retirement homes where they've been beaten and starved for years, and now they're little more than walking skeletons? That's me. If you've seen the movie Warm Blood, where there are humans, zombies, and "boneys" - I'm like the boneys. In anything more than a gentle breeze I fall over from the force of the air movement.

I had 87,000 Dong left over from Vietnam. All the food outlets past the security check-point were priced in US Dollars. I really don't understand why Vietnam does this, but apparently what I had equalled US$3.80. I bought some fries and a sundae at Burger King, leaving me with 7000 Dong as a wallet souvenir.

The air hostesses on Vietjet have a uniform which looks like a boy scout outfit. Just to be clear, I don't have any attraction towards boy scouts. The male air hostesses (air hosts? - what are male air hostesses called?)... anyway, the male air hostesses have a normal uniform of red T-shirt and black trousers, but the girls have a red T-shirt with khaki shorts, a khaki hat and a khaki neck-scarf. They're actually a tartan and not khaki, but unless you're close up they look khaki, so that's what I'm going with. Why would you dress your air hostesses as boy scouts? It's confusing for the male members on the plane. Erm, male passengers on the plane.

The flight landed in Bangkok around 1.15pm. There were so many people at Immigration that I didn't get to the luggage belts until 2.30pm. I'm pretty sure this is the only time I've ever had a long wait at Immigration. Usually I'm through in about twenty minutes at the most. Although, having said that, Immigration and Customs are also the sort of thing that I just forget about after a week or two.

In the queue next to mine there was a Vietnamese woman who wasn't getting through. The officer was looking at her passport, looking at her, looking at her passport, looking at her. He showed the officer at the next desk, and he shook his head as well. The officer kept scrutinising her, then asked for another ID. She gave him a driver licence or ID card or something. He looked at that, looked at her, looked at the passport, looked at her. Nope. I don't know what happened in the end, but she clearly was not the person on the passport photo.

I'll be in Thailand for just a few days and then down to Malaysia. I haven't got a flight homewards yet, so not sure when that will be exactly.

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