The Never-ending Journey

It was morning and it was time to leave Hanoi, and Vietnam for that matter. We were booked on the overnight train from Hanoi (Gia Lam station in the north east of the city) to Nanning in China. We would then pick up another train from Nanning to Guangzhou and then get a last train to Hong Kong. It was looking like a bit of a mammoth journey, but it was the only option other than flying.

We had plenty of time to waste in the day before getting the train at 9:40pm, but the problem was that because we had been in Hanoi for so long we had pretty much done and seen everything. So the only thing on the agenda was lunch, get some more water and try and find a small supermarket to get some more toiletries that we were running low on. We left the hotel at 12:00pm and took a walk down to a greeny/lakey area on the map. There wasn’t much to see, especially as we needed to pay 4,000 VND to get inside. We did, however, pass by/through an old deserted arcade hall, with all the machines there, a woman in a central kiosk thing, but with no power to any of the machines. And they were all ridiculously old too, like Operation Wolf and Chase HQ. Weird.

A park that we did go into...

According to my Google Maps map there was another lake nearby so we went and chilled out there on a bench for an hour or so. We were getting hungry for our late-lunch by that point so we headed back to our favourite haunt, Gecko, and had another of their cracking toasted baguettes (James had the same one 3 times in a row, so it must have been good!). We played some cards to waste a little more time and supped away on a couple of large Tiger beers which were ridiculously refreshing after the afternoon heat had been raining down on us.

Ummmmm.....a dragon fly

We made our way back to the hotel and ordered a taxi to get us to the Gia Lam station as it certainly wasn’t walkable. But it was rush hour though. The road outside the hotel was always manic at this time of day but we hoped that by the time the taxi arrived it would have cleared out a little bit. It hadn’t. We managed to eke our way through the millions of motorbikes and scooters until we made it to the main road and could get out of first gear. But only into second. Briefly. It was still manic on the main road as hundreds of people tried to get over the bridge to the other part of Hanoi that we never even thought of visiting. While we crawled along the bridge I noticed some terrific lightning flashing in the sky above the city, unlike anything I had seen before. It seemed pretty ominous so I rolled down the window to get a better look and noticed that there was absolutely no thunder whatsoever. Possibly because the lightning was above the city and not making contact with the earth. It was still going when we eventually reached the train station.

Train station Ga Gia Lam

The station was pretty basic, with blue plastic chairs and not much else! As the lightning was still going on, and we had over 2 hours to wait for the train, I wandered outside to take some long-exposure shots of the sky to see if I could bag me a “lightning shot”. What I actually got was a bunch of people looking at me from their doorways thinking that I was up to no good, so I made my way back inside and waited with James.

Lightning!!

As I returned to the waiting room all the power in the street went out. Not good. Considering what James went through in Hoi An with his suit we realised that this couldn’t bode well for the train journey. Even if they were diesel trains there would more than likely be something to delay it, or indeed cancel it altogether. So we sat there in the darkness and waited. It wasn’t long before James got itchy feet and went for a wander to see if he could purchase something with our last remaining Dong. By the time he got back they had got one light working in the office. Then two. But the rest of the street seemed to still be using candles. James returned empty-handed, but soon the power had been restored and we were able to see what we were doing again.

James, taking a picture of me, taking a picture of him...

James went for another sortie whilst I stayed with the bags, and while he was gone a station employee gestured to me to move from our seats as I had told her I was going to Nanning in China. Her English wasn’t great so I couldn’t exactly work out what I was supposed to be doing, but it seemed that I needed to move to another set of seats. As I was struggling with my bag a young girl came over and showed me that there was a different waiting room for Nanning – that’s what the other one was trying to tell me. But as James wasn’t back I had to move everything myself and somehow managed to get all our stuff there in one go (I certainly wasn’t going to leave anything unattended) and waited by the new waiting room for my brothers return.

He showed up (with what seemed to be a locally-produced can of deodorant from a corner shop – it certainly was no Lynx, which is certainly a brand leader in the global deodorants category…) and we took our seats with a Japanese traveller from Tokyo called Yoshi. We sat and chewed the fat as we still had over an hour to go before we could board our train. As we chatted, a Chinese lady across from us joined in/hijacked our conversation and began barking phrases and questions at us in broken English. She seemed nice enough and we responded in a kindly manner, although some of the questions just went way over our heads – especially the one about a German doctor that got a free visa to China…or something like that. As we chatted amongst the four of us a girl also joined in the conversation as she was also heading to Nanning on the same train as us. Her name was Nina and she helped a little with the translating for the Chinese woman to ask us more questions. Oh, I forgot to mention that a few minutes before that there had been a pop and one of the fluorescent lightbulbs in the ceiling had caught on fire. With the lightning, the power-cut and the near-burning-down of the waiting room I couldn’t help but wonder if someone “upstairs” didn’t want us to get on that train…

Yoshi and Jimmy

When the time came to board we filed up and headed for coach 2, as per our ticket. The first ticket guy said coach 2 also, but it was locked. So we followed Nina to coach 3 and eventually got on, but not in the berths that were on the ticket (1 and 2) as we were simply herded into rooms at the whim of the second ticket guy. It worked out for the best though as we ended up in a 4-berth sleeper compartment with Nina and a spare bed. We chatted for a while as it was still reasonably early but we began to flag as the night wore on so we turned in and tried to get some shut-eye as best we could.

Nina.......and my arm