I'm on the Night Train

Me and Dad hop off the plane at Hanoi airport, eager to see how our favourite part of Vietnam from two years ago has changed, if at all. In the airport we see bus tickets to Hanoi (the airport is 15km away) for $20USD, we scoff and walk outside, and find seats on the same bus for 25000 dong (about $2). We buy tickets and waste forty five minutes waiting for the damn thing to take off. As soon as we're off we are accosted by an army of vulture-like moto drivers trying to flog hotels. One of the hotels is right on Hoan Kiem Lake, in the very centre of Hanoi, and he's offering a free ride to get there. We take a harrowing ride through Hanoi (my driver almost crashes into a parked car and Dad's nearly runs over an old woman on a bicycle) and arrive at the rather nice Hoan Kiem Lake Hotel, where the price per night has magically jumped up by $5. We haggle down a bit and eventually accept since the location is awesome and the rooms are legitimately excellent.

Hanoi certainly has changed. They've ruined the place by introducing such travesties as traffic lights, pedestrian crossings, green/red man signals, compolsury helmets for motorbike riders, and the number of cars has massively increased. 

[I just completely lost my train of thought because I got caught up the song I was listening to and spent a full five minutes drumming on the table, swaying from side to side and playing air guitar during the solo. Rare opportunities to listen to music is making go mad. Seriously, I can only think in music now. Songs get stuck in there for days. What is this entry about?]

Um, Hanoi. Oh yeah, it's basically because almost orderly, but like with every Asian attempt to mimick the West, there's something not quite right about it. The road rules are really more of a firm reccommendation, and everyone is slightly unsure of themselves. The result is actually a more dangerous and less predictable traffic flow. Two years ago you could shut your eyes and blindly stumble across a horrifically busy street and you'd be fine, as all the bikes would just weave around you. It was chaos, but somehow the flow was never stopped and things just worked. Now the charm is fast disappearing. On the other hand, the sudden law stating anybody caught without a helmet will get a USD$20 on the spot fine meant the riders went from having no helmets to all wearing helmets overnight, which over here really is vital. 

It wasn't all bad though. We tracked down two street kitchens we discovered last time round. First was bun bo nam bo, arguably the most delicious noodle dish you will ever eat. The price had doubled, but the meal was even better than our memory had led us to believe. I ended up eating here about five times during my brief stay in Hanoi. 60 Hand Dieu St, if you're ever in the region (do not miss under any circumstances). We also found the most popular breakfast pho bo joint in Hanoi again, and after eating dozens of bowls of the noodle soup from across the country, I can say with some authority that this place is the best you will find. Bat Dan St, look for the pho joint with a massive queue of people waiting for it, and a massive a cauldron full of broth. It's amazing.

Ariel rocked up and we went to see Ho Chi Minh's Mausoleum, where the legendary communist ruler's preserved body is still displayed. Sadly, it was closed for Tet New Year. The Ho Chi Minh Museum was open though, so we went through the building learning about how awesome Uncle Ho is at everything. We had a couple of glasses of bia hoi on the way back (the cheapest beer in the world - not amazing, but pretty damn good considering it costs about fifty Aussie cents a glass at the most). Ariel, ever the snob, complained anyway.

From here we got a ticket on the night train up to Sapa, the mountainous region in the far north of the country. So at 9:30pm, I'm on the night train, read to crash and burn (I'll never leeeeaarn, I'm on the - ... sorry). We're in a little cabin with two double bunk beds, sharing with some Korean woman. The trip is ten hours or something, but the beds are good enough that it's really not bad. We get to Lao Cai, the end of the line, and commandeer a minivan loaded with Tet decorations to take us the remaining 35km to Sapa. We have brekky (scrambled eggs in a baguette, traditional Vietnamese food ftw). As we were eating we discovered the hotel/restaurant did trekking tours (we were too cheap to book one in Hanoi) at very cheap rates, so we booked a three day trek with two nights in homestays, leaving in an hour and a half. It was just the three of us and a guide. Our guide, Ker, was a twenty year old girl of the Black Hmong minority people. She was under five feet tall, like most of the locals. She took us through the incredible carved terrace rice paddies in the mountains and through a bunch of villages. The villagers, Ker's family included, are mostly subsistence farmers. They're perfectly content to simply survive, living off rice and veges for every meal, working by day and resting at night. Ker's family sell nothing, and trade little. Of the ten US dollars we paid each per day, Ker was getting less than 10% of that, and half of her wage she gives directly to her family. The Hmong have a bunch of massive water buffalos perfectly trained to plow the fields without the fuss, and to pretty much lie around all day doing nothing (they have the most HARDCORE stare ever. They look straight into your soul. They have big fuck-off horns and you know that they'll gore you if you annoy them).

16km later and we were at our first homestay. It was surprisingly civilised - a western toilet and a hot shower in a little outhouse, a TV, and relatively comfy foam mattresses upstairs. Ker, who does not have a TV at home, sat glued to the screen like a six year old for the entire duration of the stay (she was perfectly content to watch terrible Chinese slapstick comedy overdubbed with Vietnamese for hours on end). Even the ridiculous cold of the mountains was no match for the super thick blankets we had (seriously, the MOMENT the sun disappears the temperature drops to about five degrees). 

After a breakfast of pancakes (Dad brought a much needed tube of Vegemite over, so I smeared it all over my pancake, and there was much rejoicing), we set off for day 2 of our hike. This time the terrain was extremely steep - up and down - through tiny tracks on the side of cliffs, often slippery with only the occasional foothold. The water buffalo stared menacingly at us from their perches around the track - for big, lumbering animals they can get to some ridiculous places. We saw local kids sprinting down the mountain dragging massive logs with vines that they had tied around them. Often the kids would have to jump as the log slid under them, lest they get crushed. If a log went over the edge there's no doubt the child would get dragged over too, but this didn't seem to phase them. Apparently this is all in preparation for Tet, which the Hmong people take very seriously, despite it coming from a totally different religion than their shamanist beliefs. After crossing a waterfall (a series of bamboo pipes diverted sizable streams of water into the villages) we eventually got to the main road and crossed through a freaking construction site (the Vietnamese government are building a dam, or a road, or something), so while the views took a turn for the ugly, the trekking got fun - we had to climb down a near verticle cliff - as we made our way to the very bottom of the valley to find our homestay for the night in the village. 

On the way we came across a local dude asking for medicine. We were about to dismiss it before we noticed a wound on his leg that had been dressed by tying a piece of hemp over it with some vines. Apparently he hurt his leg chopping down trees (I'm assuming he got himself with an axe - ouch). The guy takes off the dressing to reveal a HUGE gaping hole in his leg, which had been stuffed full of tobacco, presumably to soak up the blood. Deep enough to hit the bone. Suddenly the first aid kit I'm holding seems very inadequate. By this stage a couple of other trekking groups have gathered and we have a full on discussion about what to do. Some people want to take out the tobacco and clean out the wound - but this risks dislodging the blood clot and starting up more bleeding, not to mention the incredibly unhygeinic conditions out on the path. The guy can't go to the local medical clinic because it is closed for the weekend, and the hospital in Sapa isn't free. After conversations back and forth between trekkers and locals, translated many times. We end up taking up a collection of cash from as many passerby as possible and getting the guy a motorbike into Sapa. The cynics in the group hated the idea because they thought he'd just pocket the cash and run (or limp! I'm going to hell), but we figured it was worth it to save him from infecting his wound and losing his leg. We watched him hop on the motorbike and ride off, then resumed trekking. I really do wonder if he went to the hospital - the money he got is an awful lot by local standards, he and his family could eat meat for dinner, or buy presents for the upcoming Tet. As an older guy he also would be likely to place more faith in dodgy local remedies than proper medical treatment, so there's every chance he'd leave his leg as is and live the life. On the other hand, the wound was in extreme danger of getting infected if he didn't get it cleaned out and stitched up. I hope for his sake that he did the smart thing - we got the Vietnamese speakers to emphasise the importance of the hospital pretty damn firmly.

After that saga was finally over and we were a good hour and a half behind schedule, we trekked on and soon made it to the village where we'd be spending the night. Ariel was still full of energy though, and demands a challenge be set for him. Dad points to a rocky area where a landslide had taken place, on the side of a mountain way off in the distance. "See the big waterpipe right at the top? Go climb in there, see what's inside. I'll give you 20,000 dong". We laugh at the ridiculousness of the prospect. Even Ariel knows it's a retarded idea. Then the annoying American woman pipes up, deadly serious, and says "Oh no, you can't do that! That's not safe! Oh my god". Ariel laughs, he has all the provocation he needs. He jogs off in the vague direction of the mountain, and is not seen or heard of again for half an hour. The guides are a combination of worried and amused "Where is CRAZY BOY?". Eventually I see a little black speck on the mountain. The stubborn fool is slowly but surely climbing his way up the loose rock churned up by a landslide. We get talking with some other backpackers, including yet more Aussie chicks, and a mother/son combo from Slovakia - the mother spoke no English, so we spoke through her son Zoran's translations. All the while we had the entertainment of a distant Ariel gaining and losing ground. Eventually he gets painfully close to the pipe, loiters around, and starts coming back down. FAILURE. An hour later he rocks up covered in dirt, demanding that we buy him beer.

Another guide, Chi, comes to the rescue and drags us inside to watch her cook stuff. Ariel has already left to bathe in the hot springs down in the village (he truly is a master of timing - he missed the entire cooking process and most of the meal). Chi was the wok master, cooking five or six dishes in a matter of minutes with just the one wok. She could control the temperature of the open fire most impressively, considering all you can really do is shuffle around the burning logs. Still, she could lightly blow on a stick and have it burst into flames (she's a sorceress, I swear). In any case, the meal was delicious. Ariel's arrived back midway through, thermostat apparently stuffed, and proceeds to spend the evening (6 degrees!) without a shirt on. By this stage everybody else thought he was a raging lunatic, myself included. I received many codolences; "I'm sorry you have to put up with him for so long. I know I couldn't do that", etc.

Remember how earlier I said we hiked down a huge valley from the road above? No? Too bad, I did. The next morning we had to do it in reverse. This was outrageously hard going, with every step of the way steep, steep uphill. I wasn't so much puffed out as totally out of energy after the past few days, so naturally I found it pretty tough. I have never been so glad to get shoved into a crowded minibus (which took us back to Sapa town, which after seeing nothing but tiny villages suddenly seemed huge and out of place). Another night train (I can never get enough!) and we were back in our hotel in Hanoi, lounging on the outrageously comfortable beds and generally feeling fantastic.

I'm happy now, the blog is pretty much only a day behind me, which is more than can be said of the rest of the trip. Now I just need the motivation to upload some photos and resize them and post them. And show a map of our route to give some sense to the entries. 

Who am I kidding, I'll do that back in Australia.