It was Monday morning again,
and we were getting up early. Not to go to work, obviously, but to get to the
train station in order to book our tickets to Nanning in China, and then to get
to the Indian embassy to sort our visa out for visiting the country. It was of
most importance to get the visa sorted as our flight back to the UK was from
Mumbai, so no visa would mean no flight, and I want to have Christmas this
year! We couldn’t organise the visa first as we needed to show our Chinese visa
to the train station ticket office to prove that we were eligible to enter the
country. And also, we would need to hand our passports over at the embassy and
they would keep hold of them til our last day in Hanoi.
The “continental breakfast”
laid on by the Hanoi Eclipse Hotel…..wasn’t. It looked nothing like the
picture, and nothing like any continental breakfast I have ever had before. Two
fried eggs, two fried slices of garlic sausage, a mound of salt next to the
eggs and one massive warm, crispy bread roll. I couldn’t eat the garlic
sausage, not for breakfast. And one of my eggs had touched the mound of salt so
that was a strange experience in my mouth. But it was free so we munched as
much as we dared and then got ready to hit the train station.
It’s not far to get from the
hotel to the train station, maybe about 20 minutes walk/weave between the
traffic. We were told to line up at ticket booth 7, but there was nobody there,
just a “closed” sign, so we slumped onto the seats nearby and waited. After
inspecting the huge fish tank and the cat that was curled up asleep in the
wires of the floor buffer James realised that he had forgotten the passport
photo for the Indian visa. So he had to dash back to the hotel while I waited
on the seats for his return.
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| It had a cat-alytic converter! No good? Oh well... |
In the time it took for him to
return a girl had approached booth 7 and ushered me over to sort the tickets,
but I made a “5 minutes” gesture as James had still not come back. She wandered
off and I continued my wait. He returned after about 30 minutes waiting and we
queued up at booth 7 again. We waited…and waited…and waited. Eventually another
woman came over and began organising the tickets. We knew exactly what tickets
and train we needed so when she tried to overcharge us (Foreigner Tax again…)
James batted it back and the price somehow dropped to lower than what we had
been advised by Seat 61 (our Bible on Asia travel – www.seat61.com)
by 35,000 VND. That’s 10 Fresh Beers in Café 43!
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| Waiting...and waiting...and waiting |
With our train tickets sorted we
sped down to the embassy, hoping that we wouldn’t another manic charge to get
through the front doors like we experienced at the Chinese embassy in Bangkok.
It was all very civilised and relatively quiet when we got in. We took a seat
and waited for the visa guy to come free. We were beaten to the office by a
girl carrying about 20 applications so we thought that we would be in for a
lengthy wait but I managed to get us in at the same time and the chap happily
began thumbing through our applications once the girl had handed him hundreds
of dollars and left. My heart skipped a beat when he claimed that I had some
details missing from my previous visit to India, but then he saw it and gave it
a “tick”. It was like being back at high school; sitting in the man with
authority’s office whilst he checked the work I had handed in and ticked the
relevant parts. Thankfully it was OK and he proceeded to do the same with
James’s application. We paid him the visa fee and left in high spirits –
hopefully that would be the last of the complicated visa applications as the
one for Nepal we can organise at the border.
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| My hopes and dreams rest on this document |
As we had had a relatively
stressful start to the day we made our way back to the hotel and lazed around
with a bite to eat. After that we wandered down to the citadel to have a mooch
round. On the way we passed a statue to Lenin, with some kids skateboarding in
front of him. He didn’t look very impressed with them…
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| Mad skills... |
At the citadel we cautiously
entered the grounds as it said that the place was closed on Mondays, but there
were other people there too so we took a chance and went for it. It was nice
and peaceful in there without the hustle and bustle of the traffic that
surrounded the place. There was also what looked to be a Miss Vietnam
photo-shoot going on, from what we could gather. We had to pick and choose our
moments for exploring the citadel as around each and every corner there were
pretty girls getting their photos taken, so we tried valiantly not to be in the
back of their pictures.
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| Hanoi Citadel |
We left the citadel and
wandered back to the hotel via the huge cathedral that sits near the citadel. It
was mighty big, but closed, so we could only see it from the outside, which was
a shame but it was still well worth finding. Once back at the hotel I did a
quick search on somewhere good to eat, but nothing really came up. There seems
to be a huge gap between the local street eateries and the top-end
foreigner-friendly places, so we have struggled to find places in the middle.
We managed to find Puku, which was right outside a massive Karaoke bar (something that they seem to love over here)
and had a reasonably nice meal with a bottle of Hanoi beer. It was the last
meal that I would have before my birthday, and it was a shame it wasn’t better,
but I was hoping to find a top-notch place for the following day so we could
celebrate.
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| James contemplates going to the Karaoke bar |
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