Booked our trip to Hanoi (Vietnam) while we were there and got picked up at 1.30pm yesterday. Arrived in Hanoi today at 5pm...yeh, over 27 hour bus journey. Ive never experienced anything like it - Imagine a coach, but instead of having horizontal rows of seats - they have three rows bunk-beds going along the inside of the bus... Each bed could not fit me in, neither length or breadth. Luckily, my bed wasn't one of the ones down the aisle...it was a much smaller one at the back, lucky me. They had converted the usual 5 back seats into a toilet and three beds alongside one-another with no gap (both under and over) Craig was in "the cave" underneath where I was sleeping alongside two girls Id never met, giggidy.\\There were things written in the cave such as "Toilet leaks - Get out while you still can - enjoy pissy feet - I want to shoot the driver - Fucking bus, 24 hours in hell" Which...is....encouraging.
Oh by the way, we had already had a sweaty 3.5 hour journey from Vang Vieng down to Vientiane for the connecting bus, which makes things even better.
So I make my introductions to the girls im sleeping next to, took two valium, read some of the Lost Symbol by Dan Brown and fell into a deep sweaty cramped sleep. Woke up at the border where we had to get off the bus and fight with everyone else to get our passports stamped...after this, we then went to find the bus to discover it had gone somewhere. By the way, this is at 6am and it was freezing. Luckily there was absolutely no one willing to help us find the bus or tell us what to do next so we had to guess our way through the border....Finally we found our bus and went to get on to be told "no" by the driver....Cheers.
Turned out they had nicely thrown our bags off the bus and we needed to go put them through security, after getting our passport checked again. Headed back to the bus with our checked bags and guess what, someone wanted to check our passport...Got back on the bus feeling cold and very hungry. Obviously, it wouldn't be long until we stopped for breakfast, toilet and something to drink...nope....we drove for ten straight hours before reaching Hanoi. As you can imagine, a very hungry, tired, thirsty, hot Jamie left the bus.
We managed to find the backpackers, after nearly being run over by the millions of motorbikes flying around (by the way there are over 16 million motorbikes in Vietnam...fact). The backpackers is awesome though, free breakfast and wifi...free beer between 8 and 9pm and its cheap as you like...Bumped into Tom, the Aussie lad we met on the first tubing...he's staying here as well.
Planning to go on a 2 or 3 day trip to Halong Bay which looks pretty amazing, so will blog again then.
Cheers,
Jay
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