It takes a lot to laugh, it takes a train to cry (part 1)

Friday, 09/11/2012 - 148 A.D.

It was finally time to leave Hanoi. Never again would we stay five nights in a city, as our remaining time quickly starts to diminish we’ll be getting by on two and three nights in some places. But, if you read the last post in which I moaned about being in Hanoi too long, you’ll agree that in some cases less is definitely more!

Above is the typical just-about-to-pack-up-and-leave-hotel shot, but in this case it would be more than 48 hours before we’d have hotel beds again. Ahead of us lay an epic journey across 543 miles and three separate countries (sort of). But as usual we had to spend the afternoon wandering around waiting for the moment to leave. Using the GPS on Tim’s phone, we picked out any bits of greenery that we hadn’t visited and were within walking distance, then checked them out. We even paid 4,000 dong each to enter one park, but as parks go it was pretty damn good. During recent times like this when we sit down on a bench to take in the scene, we often find ourselves discussing what we plan on doing when we return to “normality” – the type of conversation we’d never have entertained in June, July, maybe even August.

["What will you do when you go back?"

"Probably open a bakery. And raise some kids."

"You need a girlfriend first."

"Oh yeah."]

If there is one enduring image that I shall miss of Vietnam then it's the little plastic furniture out on the street. They just love to sit on those tiny chairs and stools to drink their preservative-free gutrot beer. While walking to the park I accidentally kicked one of these stools over, which ricocheted into a another on which a guy's beer was balanced. It spilled over the top a little, but not enough to require my buying him another one. He may have been too drunk to notice me doing it anyway. Switching from drink to food, we took a late lunch at Gecko, the small cafe that we've been to three times during our time here - leaving aside the KFC's, etc., that's a record for anywhere on the whole trip.

After a trip to the supermarket to stock up (gonna be eating crap for the next two days!), it was time to order a taxi for 18:00. Trains heading for China don't go out of the main Hanoi station, they leave from a small station six kilometres to the north east called Gia Lam. The slow crawl through the rush hour traffic was made all the more exciting by the tremendous flashes of lightning in the distance. However, there’s something not so tremendous about flashes of lightning in the distance, i.e. they stop being in the distance and start flashing where you are, along with the thunder and rain! But no, Hanoi held out yet again and, to be fair to this city, our stay here was the driest we’d had since arriving in Singapore.

Gia Lam station was a yucky little place with the kind of waiting room that could challenge the serotonin levels of even the happiest of clowns. We had only been in it for about ten minutes when the power cut off and the disgruntled sighs of various passengers could be heard from somewhere within the darkness. Second time Vietnam has done this to me – good job the trains are diesel and not electric! At least in this case we could blame the storm, though it wouldn’t have surprised me if a cockroach had nibbled a fusebox somewhere. After a couple of minutes some emergency lighting came on behind the ticket counter, but it did nothing to illuminate me right at the other end of the room, so I went for a walk and used up the last of my dong on some deodorant spray that may have come with a government health warning that I couldn’t read. Tim wasn’t impressed with the stench – he may not have been able to see me when I returned, but he could sure as heckfire smell me!

Gradually lights came back on here and there, before we were told to go and wait in the next room by one of the railway staff. It was here that we met Yoshi, a fellow traveller from Japan who was equalling our record by travelling for six months, though he was only going around Asia at this point. He’s done lots of travelling in his time, his job as a freelance pianist allowing him to up sticks and go when he wants to. And, at 38, he’s even older than me! Sorry, but it’s kinda refreshing after constantly running into the early 20-something party crowd. 

Yoshi was heading to Nanning, as we were, and as was the lady in the above shot. She was Chinese, very friendly and enthusiastic about chatting, but because of her iffy-level of English (though fair play to her for trying), I never quite worked out where she was from. But we had a lot of fun getting our passports out and comparing visas, a pastime that us travellers never get tired of. And then there was a cry from railway staff and passengers alike as a light in the corner of the ceiling suddenly sparked, accompanied by the strong smell of burning. So much for the electrics being correctly restored! 

Come 21:15 and it was time to board the train. As per usual, Tim and I had booked ourselves into a sleeping berth, but the sleeper berth with four beds is known as a "soft sleeper". Yoshi had booked a "hard sleeper", which is essentially the same design, but with six beds instead of four. Naturally, the price is a bit cheaper, but if you're on one of the top bunks there ain't much room between your nose and the ceiling. Just before we went to board the train, our little group was joined by Nina, a young Chinese lady from Beijing who had just done a week's travelling in Vietnam. She was also booked into our soft sleeper berth, and I'm sure she was initially thrilled to bits to be sharing it with two English lads who looked like they'd been dragged through a hedge backwards, then forwards, then backwards again. But, with no fourth person to mix things up, it was a really nice atmosphere in our little berth. Nina has a job with the World Bank and she speaks excellent English, so no communication barrier got in the way. It was extremely useful to learn all about the country we were heading to from someone who actually lives there, rather than relying on The Rough Guide or Wikitravel. In fact, I think we fired far too many questions poor Nina's way, but she seemed more than happy to converse. 

Given that we were due to be woken at 2 a.m. to go through the Vietnamese exit process, we decided after a while to stop yapping and try and get some sleep. This Chinese sleeper train was far superior to those of Vietnam. Sure, it could have used a lick of paint or a bit of modernisation here and there, but the overall feel was cleaner, plus there were nice touches like carpeted floors and flasks for hot water provided. There was overall reassurance that we wouldn’t have to go rat or roach spotting in the night! And somehow the three of us did manage to sleep, and boy could we have kept our eyes closed when that knock at the door came dead on 02:00. We only had to take our valuables and leave the train to go and sit in the catchily-named station of Dong Dang. All of our passports were surrended to be stamped collectively, then names were called out to come and collect them individually. Given that Tim and I were the only Westerners around, Nina offered to help out if the border guard struggled to read our English names. She had a point, because he did, and I’ve no idea what he called me, but I could tell it was my passport he held from the big smudge on the front.

Back on the top bunk, there was only time to get a donut down me (don’t ask!) before lying back and getting 15 minutes of slumbers. That was the time it took the train to get from Vietnam and into China. Pingxiang is where Chinese immigration facilities are situated and now we had to bring all of our luggage out with us. Not only were all bags scanned, they were also physically searched by border guards, which really slowed down the process. Still, the Chinese have been thorough so far, so why stop now? I was a bit gutted because my rucksack was packed up very tightly and if the guard went rummaging around amongst everything it was going to take me a while to get it zipped up again. Fortunately he spent most of his search patting it down, rather than going through my dirty grundies. Tim later confessed that he’d suddenly realised he had washing powder in his bag and considered rushing to the toilets to get rid of it, but then realised how suspicious that would look. Gone was the laissez-faire attitude he displayed when crossing the Singapore-Malaysia border all those weeks ago!

Come 05:45 (having jumped forward a time zone), we were back on our train and off to sleep for the third time. Shortly before arriving at Nanning we were awoken by some very loud, brutally-authentic music, probably played to make sure we were up and ready to alight the train so that it could continue running to schedule. Nanning is a city that I knew nothing about up to a few weeks ago. In fact, even when arriving here, I still knew next-to-nothing about it, yet the greater area of the city boasts over six million people! Essentially, all we had to do here was book ourselves onto a train for Guangzhou. Nina had come here for a friend’s wedding and, although she would be out all day, she offered to let us dump our gear at her hotel room where we could at least take a shower. And we politely turned down her kind offer. I remember five minutes after she’d walked away (with the hope of meeting up again in Beijing later in the month) and thinking why did we just refuse her offer? Now that we'd lost our native support, we were two English lads alone again. But we'd been alright before, hadn't we? Sure, but this was no longer the tourist zone of Hanoi, this was deepest China, and it wasn’t to be messed with. Here they didn't just have a different language, they had a different alphabet and to our nasty surprise we saw that they weren't in the habit of writing timetables in English.  

We were going to have to work harder than normal to get on that train...because if we didn't get on that train...we were in big trouble in little China!