Yesterday, after a well deserved nights rest we packed up our stuff to get out of Vinh. I learned my lesson that I need to have things written down in both English and Vietnamese when I'm not in a touristy area so that people know what I am looking for. We caught a cab to the bus station and went inside. I was not going to talk to anyone who wasn't firmly planted behind a desk selling tickets. While walking through the parking lot of the bus station, I spotted a large new bus that was marked "Hanoi" on the front. I went to the counter and inquired about Hanoi, I asked the guy to show me the bus we would be on before I agreed to give him any money and was relieved to find out that it was the bus I wanted to be on and it was leaving in 15 minutes.
The guy behind the counter had by far the best English of anyone we met in Vinh. After we had purchased our tickets I had a couple of minutes to chat with him. Janelle was off buying some water for the trip and I was watching the luggage. The man asked me where Janelle was and I told him that she was off shopping, this sent the man on a tangent about his wife.
She can spend the whole day shopping in the store, I ask her, what were you doing and she tells me, it's air conditioned in the store and I like to look at all of the things. She wants to get a diamond on her tooth, she goes to the hairdressers all the time, she tells them make it straight, then she tells them, make it curly. She is always buying something.
We got on the bus and it was a sleeper bus with two levels. The seats could lay nearly flat or could sit up like beach chairs.
The seats were really nice except that the place for your feet was enclosed and my legs were slightly too long to fit comfortably. As with all of the bus experiences we have encountered the bus swerved, honked, stopped randomly and tried to overfill the bus (people sat in the aisles between the seats).
The thing that made this bus trip unique was the bathroom breaks. The first one was at a roadside restaurant. All of the other people on the bus, they were all Vietnamese, streamed through the restaurant out to the back. There was a concrete wall and a four foot tall blue tarp. The men were to pee on the wall and the women were expected to walk around the tarp to squat pee on the ground. As the women squatted the men's urine ran over their feet. The tarp wall was so small any person standing up could easily look over it.
The next bathroom stop was even worse. I went ahead of Janelle to scout it out, this time there was a separate room for men and women except that that's all it was. A tiled room with a trough around the outside on the floor. I warned Janelle that it wasn't going to be pretty and by the look on her face when she came out, I knew it wasn't. Without being too graphic, the floors had not been cleaned after people did their bathroom business in the open, on the floor, leaving behind all kinds of unmentionable things.
After applying entire bottles of hand sanitizer to every part of our bodies we got back on the bus to Hanoi. Eight hours after getting on the bus we were dropped at the bus station and made our way to our hotel to have nice hot showers with lots of soap.
We spent today walking around the old town of Hanoi and trying to book a trip to Halong Bay. We wandered from shop to shop seeing what they had to offer and comparing them. We eventually narrowed it down to two options, a cheaper but still nice boat or a much nicer boat that is probably out of our price range. We finally decided on the expensive one because they upgraded us to a four star boat for the price of a three star boat. We will probably have to leave Asia a week earlier now but it should be worth it. We also wanted to plan a trip to Sapa so we went to the train station to book a night train for three days in advance. The trains were full again! I don't know what it is but maybe we are destined to never get on a sleeper train. There are so many tourists that go to Sapa that there are companies that attach their train cars to the Vietnamese trains and charge tourists $35-40 for the journey each way whereas the Vietnamese train we were trying to book was only $12. We headed back to the old town, where our hotel is to try and sort something out. We found a three night and two day tour of Sapa for $95 that included train tickets, a hotel in Sapa, guided tours of some villages and all meals included. Since it would cost us $70 each for the train tickets alone we quickly scooped up this deal. We head to Sapa the night we come back from Halong Bay. We also booked flights to Nha Trang for the day after we return from Sapa, it's going to be a hectic but exciting next couple of days.
Check out a couple of pictures of Hanoi in the slideshow below:
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