Vinh

The conclusion to the entry "Bus Full of Beer"

We arrived in Vinh just as it was starting to get dark, without any Vietnamese dong(VND), without anything booked or planned and knowing nothing about the town. We didn't know where to tell the bus to drop us off so he dropped us off at the bus station.

Outside the bus station we got harassed by people trying to get us onto night buses which we didn't want. We decided to go to a coffee shop with WiFi to drink something and sort out our plans. We found a coffee shop not far from the bus station but I had forgotten that we only had USD and LAK but not any Vietnamese dong and the coffee shop only took VND. We asked where an ATM was and were pointed back towards the bus station. We headed back to the bus station looking for an ATM but couldn't find one. I remembered passing several banks along the bus route so we walked the way our bus had come from.

We found several banks but as it was now late most of them were closed and didn't have outside 24 hour ATM machines. Finally we located an ATM outside but it wouldn't work as I have an international card instead of a Vietnamese one. We kept walking and were eventually able to find an ATM that worked. By this time we were both hungry and exhausted.

We decided to find internet, book a hotel and call it a night. We hadn't come to another place with internet since we had left the original coffee shop and that was ages ago, so we kept walking in the direction our bus had come. Everywhere we walked people kept smiling and waving at us and saying "hello", whenever we said "hello" back they would laugh and smile. We tried asking for help to find "internet" or "coffee shop" but no one seemed to understand or speak much English at all.

After what felt like an eternity we still hadn't found any internet but did finally find a really fancy hotel who agreed to let us use their internet if we bought something from the bar. We looked online to see what the town had to offer and what hotels were available. The exact description from wikitravel.org is this:

Vinh's role as an industrial port city led to heavy destruction by aerial bombing during the war, as a result it has remained a drab, rather uninteresting place.

None of the hotels online looked that great and they all seemed expensive. We decided that it wasn't worth staying in town for the night and instead we would take a night train to Hanoi and just sleep on there.

We hailed a cab to take us to the train station and when the driver pulled up I said "train station" and he just stared at me with a blank face of nonrecognition and then replied in Vietnamese something that I didn't understand. The driver clearly had no idea what I was talking about. I waved him off and hailed another taxi, I tried "train station", "locomotive station", "train depot", "reunification express" and I even went as far as to make like a train with my arms while saying "chugga chugga chugga choo choo" but again all of this was met with incomprehension. We tried with several other taxis but had no luck. We kept walking as one taxi driver was chasing us on foot calling his friends on two phones simultaneously trying to understand where we wanted to go. An elderly Vietnamese man and his wife were walking down the street and saw the distress we were in and asked where we wanted to go, all I had to say was "train station" and he understood immediately, relayed the Vietnamese word to the taxi driver and we were off to the train station.

We had looked online at the train times and we knew that there were several night trains to Hanoi. We couldn't book online as the only website that might have let us was under maintenance. There are four classes of cars on Vietnamese night trains, wooden benches, soft seats which are like car seats, hard sleeper which is six beds in one berth without a door from the hallway and soft sleeper which is four beds behind a door. We went to the counter and tried to buy soft sleeper beds for any of the four trains but were told they were full. In fact everything was full except for hard seats on one of the trains that didn't leave until 1am. After the day we just had neither of us wanted to spend the night sitting on hard wooden benches for eight hours.

We left the train station in search of food and internet to book a hotel room. By now it was after 9pm and many places were closed or closing. We found a bar that had WiFi and sat down. I asked if they served food and the waitress giggled at me and looked confused. I made gestures representing food and eating but this just made her laugh more and then call over another waitress who didn't understand but joined in on the giggling. I booted up my computer and logged on to Google Translate and typed in "do you have food?" to which they shook their heads. I asked for beer which again sent them into a giggling fit and attracted 2 more staff members. I typed "can we have 2 beers?" into Google Translate and they read it and tried to ask me what kind I wanted. I had no idea what kind of beer there was there and there wasn't a menu I could read so I Googled "Vietnamese beers" and then went to Google Images and kept pointing at them until one they served was on the screen. We were promptly brought two bottles of room temperature beer and two glasses of ice.

We looked online and found a hotel that we were able to book, I got the address and name in Vietnamese on my phone so I could show it to a taxi driver. We finished our beers and hopped into a taxi to our hotel, it was much easier with the name and address written down. It was also really helpful that all of the cabs have automatic meters that start when the cab starts driving so I didn't have to haggle with the drivers over the price.

We arrived at our hotel, which also doubles as a nightclub and were escorted down a long corridor to reception where we tried to check in. As we had just booked the room, the front desk clerk didn't know we were coming or have our reservation. The front desk clerk and I couldn't understand each other so I pulled out my computer and we communicated via Google Translate. We finally got things sorted and headed up to our room that was shaking from the bass of the ongoing club on the second floor.

It was 10:30pm by then and we had only eaten lunch all day so we were starving, we left the hotel and wandered the streets looking for food, we found a coffee shop with WiFi, a little bit too late to be helpful, and a couple of fruit markets but not much other food. We were considering eating fruit for dinner when we found an ice cream shop, then we found a cake shop and finally a burger stand. We ordered two hamburgers, I was told there was no cheese. We got two buns with a couple pieces of fried chicken inside and some sweet chili sauce. Not exactly a hamburger, but better than we could find anywhere else.

We headed back to the hotel exhausted and ready for some sleep. Luckily around midnight the music turned off and we both fell fast asleep.