Manic Monday

Monday, 05/11/2012 – 144 A.D.

Bonfire night in Vietnam!!!!! They don’t tend to celebrate it.

Guess what was the first thing we saw this morning as we left the room? Rattus norvegicus! Or it could have been rattus rattus. Either way, Tim stopped dead in his tracks at the top of the stairs and pointed it out before it scurried away into a hole in the wall. Is that a good thing to witness within the walls of a hotel? So much for the excellent reviews on Booking.com!

[Stock photo.]

[Pointing out the hole it scurried into.]

We had a couple of jobs to sort out this morning, the first of which was booking our train passage out of Vietnam and into China. This had to be done before we got our India visa because in order to get the tickets we had to show the China visas in our passports. Obviously to get our India visas we will have to surrender our passports for several working days. Man I am sooo getting sick of visas and will get down on my knees and thank The Road once they’re all sorted!

We arrived at the main Hanoi train station at 08:45 and were told to proceed to counter number 7 to book tickets for trains to China. Counter number 7 was the only one of the ten counters that was not staffed. We took a seat to wait, presuming that someone would be along at 09:00. At 08:59 I realised that I had rather stupidly forgotten to bring my passport photos with me, so I had to leggit to the hotel and back, which took a good half an hour. Prior to this the weather had been perfect temperature – neither warm nor cool,  but now I was sweating cobs and normal service was resumed.

By the time I got back to the station, Tim told me that a woman at counter number 7 had been, then gone. Rather than sit around like plebs, we decided to stand at the counter in the hope that someone would see us lingering. It was another fifteen minutes before a woman arrived, though she then asked us to wait five minutes while she went and fed the cat that was hanging around. By the time she got to the other side of the glass, I was envisioning the Indian embassy closing its doors just as we rushed up to them.

[We're thinking of hiring the station's cat to deal with the rat infestation at the hotel.]

The woman was obviously the international train specialist and her English was reasonable, though I had to ask her to repeat everything for clarification, as well as having to bend down a couple of feet to shove my ear through the hole in the glass. There is only one daily train out of Hanoi to Nanning, so there was no confusion with that, we just had to tell her which day we wanted it and whether we wanted top or bottom bunks. Then she asked for payment of $40 each – I quickly did a calculation in my head – 21,000 dong to the dollar, so 21,000 x 40  =  840,000 VND. Yet the website I had been looking on suggested the price was 740,000 VND. Once again we were being diddled and not by a market trader, by someone in a uniform who worked for a nationalised industry! I wrote down what I thought should be the price and asked her to provide it in dong. Probably realising that I wasn’t a foreigner to be messed around, she quoted a price of 705,000 VND. Great – even cheaper than the website said! She didn’t half have a face on her as she wrote out the tickets though.

The Indian embassy was relatively plain sailing after that. We showed our completed forms and were told to take a seat. There were only a couple of people in the queue before us, but unfortunately one of them had about thirty applications with her! She explained later they were for employees of her company – not sure if they were heading over to India on business or for one big jolly. Anyway, she didn’t hold us up for too long and soon we had surrendered our passports, along with $63 each - $20 penalty for not applying for them in our own country. Well how could we? An India visa gives you six months from the date of issue, but we’re travelling for over six months and flying out of India! Do the maths, dude!

After all of that rushing around in the morning, we took it fairly easy in the afternoon. The Old Citadel has, as its name suggests, been around for a long, long time. Built about a thousand years ago and acting as the seat of various kings, the nasty French needlessly destroyed a lot of it shortly before being booted out of the country in the 1950s. Up until 2009 what remained of it was used as an army base and off limits to visitors. Today the majority of it seemed to be used for a Miss Hanoi shoot and everywhere we walked, especially on the higher levels, we were unable to get out of shots as camera lenses pointed our way. Wouldn’t it be funny if Vietnam’s latest edition of Vogue featured a gorgeous woman in traditional dress on the front, with a dopey-looking English bloke slightly out of focus in the background, desperately trying to hide behind an ancient archway? It could happen.

And nothing much more happened today. But then again, no news is good news, so they say. Not sure who "they" are, but I'm sure they're very wise.

See you tomorrow!