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Thursday, 15th December, Sunny Hotel, Hanoi, 3:45pm

SUNSHINE!! Sunshine, sunshine, SUUUUUUUNNNNNSSSSHHHHIIIIINNNNNEEE! The weather here is amazing, nice and cool, a little cloudy, but there’s still a wonderful amount of sun and blue sky. It’s such a relief. Admittedly despite this we’re currently holed up in our hotel rooms, but that’s because a) we spent all night on a train last night, and even though we slept a little, we are still feeling pretty groggy, b) I’m being a whinger and have come down with an icky head cold, and I just want to curl up in bed and feel sorry for myself, c) we just blew a whole heap of cash going to a museum that’s closed down for the year, so we decided to just chill and recoup that blow a little.
Hanoi so far seems amazing. But first I shall talk of our train trip from Hue to Hanoi. For about $36US, you can get a “soft sleeper” in a room with three other bunks. This means a soft-ish mattress, and a room with only four, as opposed to a room with four and a slab of wood to lie on, or a room with six and a slab of wood, or a room with just chairs, which also come in either soft chairs or hard chairs. Since it’s meant to about 12-14 hours long, we figured we’d save on a night’s accommodation, and get a soft sleeper. At least we could go to the loo whenever as well, rather than the bus where you have to wait fags stink lots ß James wrote this “fags stink lots” because I just chucked a hissy-fit and stormed out of the room hunting out whoever was smoking cigarettes and stinking out our room. I can still smell it, it’s soooo strong, but I can’t find the culprit. And they’re lucky I can’t. The last thing you want when you have a cold is to breath in someone’s sick second-hand smoke. Boy am I going to love London! Anyway, as I was saying, on the bus you have to wait for the toilet breaks, but on the train you can go whenever, so that was a huge selling point for me.
The room was tiny. Four bunks with about ½ a metre between them. The beds were narrow and you could barely turn. There were pillows and blankets, but the room in the “bunker” fluctuated from muggy to cold. No wonder I’m feeling dodgy today! I couldn’t find the right temperature. It was like being on a submarine, and I joked about pinning a photo of my sweetheart on the wall, or being in “Das Boot.”
We ended up in a carriage with two Vietnamese businessmen who didn’t speak a word of English. James and I were on the top bunks, and we often used sign-language to describe what the man below was doing (because I could see the guy under James and he could see the guy under me—oh, that doesn’t sound good, does it? We slept on top of two Vietnamese men…). The guy under James was skinny and smoked like a kipper. He kept lighting the cigarettes, then walking out of the room, leaving the stench there. It got extremely annoying, and James and I both quickly developed headaches. The guy under me was chubby, and had droplets of sweat on his forehead and back of neck. He slept from about 6pm on. They were friends, and when we entered they were eating a spread of food, with cans of beer lining up on the windowsill. However they were drinking water out of paper cups, and I didn’t see them drinking the beer, although they gave one with a friend who worked on the train. I spoke to them at first, but they couldn’t understand a word. They shook our hands, then offered us two chicken kebabs each. We accepted, and they were yummy, and we haven’t got sick yet, which was nice. Then the skinny one offered me the cup of water, and I declined.
Awhile later, a man came with trays of dinner for us. James and I were careful to eat before we got on the train, so we weren’t hungry, which was good because the complimentary meal was mostly lukewarm mystery meat. Yum! Hmmm…I remember Jamie telling us you don’t say “yummy” here, but I can’t remember why. Help anyone? Anyway, James dangled his bare foot off the bunk at one stage, and the skinny guy tapped his ankle and pointed at the bed. We’d forgotten that it’s rude to show the bottoms of your feet.
The skinny man fell asleep around 8, and they both slept deeply and soundly, although the skinny guy woke up a few times to pee and smoke. Probably at the same time.
I slept okay, I guess. I woke up every hour or two for about fifteen minutes, and stirred whenever the train did something strange. It rocked really badly, and I rolled around in my bed quite a lot, but it was fairly straight most of the time so we could sleep easily. At one stage, I looked out the window and saw the wall of a mountain only centimetres from the train. The best sleep I had was between 3 and 6, after I’d been awake for about ½ an hour, and had even read for a bit. I dreamt that all my uni friends were on the train with me, and Julienne van Loon was the conductor, and she came into the room to tell us we were almost in Hanoi. It was bizarre.
We arrived in Hanoi an hour and a half later (the train was 45 mins late leaving Hue, and our platform to get onto our carriage was the only one not under cover, and, as usual, it was pissing down with rain. We waited under cover until the very last second, when we ran for our carriage). It was then that we saw the ¾ empty Vodka bottle sitting on the table between the two Vietnamese men. That explains why they slept so well!! And I thought they’d been offering me water! I would have been in for a very rude shock if I had accepted. Before leaving Hue, we arranged for a hotel in Hanoi, and they paid for a taxi to pick us up from the station and drop us at the hotel. An American hippie named John started chatting to us on the train. He was such a cliché, with a tie-dyed shirt and long, wispy grey hair pulled back in a ponytail. Every time we saw him, we made “tokin’ the mary-jane” mimes behind his back. When we told John about our driver, he asked if he could jump in with us. Boy was he hilarious. He didn’t want to stay in the hotel, but they hustled him inside. James and I sat down and prepared for breakfast, and listened to John trying to talk his way out of being given a room. Eventually he said he had to meet someone, and then he left. A boy from the hotel asked us if we wanted to stay somewhere where a room was available immediately, because they had nothing available until 12pm. We agreed, the brochure made the hotel look nicer than their place. It was the right decision, I think, because even though this hotel (Sunny Hotel) is way out of the way, it’s really, really nice and cosy (despite the smoking!), and we have got a good size room (and heaps of awesome cable channels, which is integral to us saving money by not going out drinking all night).
We came up to our room, showered, napped, missed breakfast, so we went wandering to find somewhere to eat lunch. It took about an hour, but the streets around our hotel are fabulous. They’re filled with shops and stalls, all junky but all interesting. There are heaps of thick, cheap jackets as well, which is good because it’s getting bloody cold here, and if we head into the mountains like we hope to we’ll freeze our noses off. So we need to grab at least one big thick jumper/jacket before we go. We’re also going to do Halong Bay for a couple of nights, so with that and Sapa we don’t have a lot of time in Hanoi. And Saturday is Uncle Ho day for us; we’re going to the Ho Chi Minh museum and to gaze upon his lovingly preserved body. We lost today, though, which blows. We caught a taxi to a war museum James really wanted to go to, only to discover that it had been closed since March 2005 to implement a new display. Must be some display! So almost $20US later we had driven around Hanoi for no reason. So we got off at Hoan Kiem Lake and walked around there for awhile (where a man with a creepy smile made a Catholic cross motion in the air at James). We visited a Confucian temple on an island on Hoan Kiem Lake, which cost 3000 Dong to enter (about 0.20 cents); bargain I thought! It was interesting. And best of all, there’s this myth about an giant turtle who rose out of the lake with a special sword. Many believe the sword is still somewhere in the lake. After reading this, James said,
“You reckon we’ll see some turtles?”
And I said, “Nah, no way.”
Then we noticed a branch, and there were about ten tiny turtles sitting on the branches. I thought they must have been glued on or something, because they weren’t moving.
“I’m going to say something stupid,” I said, “but they’re fake, right?”
James was snapping photos. “Yeah, of course they are!”
But then suddenly I saw one move his head ever so slightly! I squealed and told James, but he didn’t believe me. We watched for awhile longer, and then he saw one move. We shifted position, and from the new angle it was obvious they were all alive. It was very exciting!! All James and I need to see is an animal of any kind, and we’re happy for hours. Unless it’s being abused. Then we’re sad for hours.
You see, as we walked back to our hotel, I was reminded that we’re back in the Big Smoke. How? That lovely sight of abused animals! I got so used to seeing well-looked-after animals in Nha Trang, Hoi An and Hue, but now we’re seeing scrawny kittens yowling on the sidewalk again, their fur ratty and spiked with grime, their eyes watery and desperate. But the worst was when we saw a kitten, probably about 8 weeks old, tied to a post with tatty string around its neck. It was tiny, shivering, and we could see its bones sticking out. Now I hate seeing sick animals at any time, but, as most of you know, James and I absolutely adore cats, and the sight of kittens being hurt makes both of us want to cry and vomit at the same time. We’ve decided that as soon as we’re settled in London or wherever, and we know we’re going to stay for awhile, we’re going to get a cat. Yay!
We’ve been trying to figure out what we’re going to do for Christmas. I’m not sure if we’ll be on Halong Bay, or in Sapa, or just hanging around Hanoi. If we stay in Hanoi, we’re going to buy a cheap, mini Christmas tree, and take 50,000 Dong each, then go shopping separate to each other and find one another presents. It’ll be fun! Well, we’re going to buy presents either way, the mini tree depends on where we are.
And another thing, as we stood outside a restaurant trying to decide if we wanted to eat there, a woman selling bananas came up and put her triangle hat on my head, and gave me the long stick she had over her shoulder, with the bowls of bananas at either end. I was like, “uh…this isn’t like the ferryman from that myth, is it?”. She said, “photo, take photo,” but I was like “no, no, you take it back..” I imagine she would have wanted money if we took a photo, but I just didn’t feel comfortable being in a photo as a dumbass whitey pretending to be Vietnamese. I hate the tourists who do that kind of stuff, so I politely declined and handed her back her gear. If the light had been better, I might have taken a photo because she had given me the stuff, I hadn’t asked. I would never ask, or do something like that of my choice.
Oh, and our taxi driver was really nice. He kept trying to make conversation, but he couldn’t speak very good English. He kept saying words in Vietnamese/English, louder and slower, and I was reminded of us attempting to make ourselves understood in similar situations. No matter what culture you’re from, you always think “slower, louder, they’ll understand eventually!”. It stands true, I think, to a degree, because eventually we understood that he was saying he lived near Hoan Kiem lake, and had one child. Maybe. But I’m sure there was a lot more that he said that went completely over our heads. It was really nice of him to try, though.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 15th, 2005 at 7:07 pm and is filed under Travel, Vietnam. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.