The bus driver woke up about 6:00AM, and we were on our way! The road is washed out in places, just dirt, and very bumpy. The bus had to crawl in spots. Very mountainous, lots of turns, and very, very foggy and misty. The road followed a river gorge, lots of very nice views. Too bad it was so foggy, it would be great to see the mountains.
About 7:45, we stopped at Laos immigration and got stamped out of Laos. At the border, there was a big truck with hundreds of dogs packed tightly into small cages. They were going to Vietnam to be eaten (yes, they eat dog in Vietnam).
A few minutes later, we stopped at the Vietnam border and had to pay $1US to get our passports back from the officials. Corrupt!
AFter finally getting through customs, we went back to the bus and waited. 5 or 6 Vietnamese customs officials descended upon the bus, checking everyones passports, going through baggage, etc. They spent more than 10 minutes checking everything out. They were more interested in the locals than the falang. Finally the bus driver told everyone that was going to Hanoi to go to another bus. So, we changed buses. This bus is even worse! The back 1/3 of the bus was packed with baggage (which is where we had to put our backpacks). As we were getting on the bus, there were more customs officials checking passports again, so we had to go through that yet again. Courtney and I got the rearmost seats, just in front of all the baggage that was being bused to Vietnam. The whole thing was crazy, with so many Vietnamese officials swarming everywhere. They "caught" one woman who had bags and bags of shoes stored all over the bus. I don't know what happened to her (if anything), because we had to depart that bus for the Hanoi bus before we could know.
We finally left about 9:30.
Roads much better than in Laos. Vietnam is more like Thailand than it is like Laos. Much more developed.
At noon, we stopped at a small restaurant for lunch. No english menu, so we had to use a Vietnamese-to-English dictionary to order rice, egg, and vegetabes, and tea to drink. Court and I both craving McDonalds!
Cloudy and cool today.
There are a helluva lot of cows in Vietnam!! And they're not smart enough to not stand in the middle of the roads. Traffic is constantly dodging them.
The stretch to Hanoi is total agriculture. It's like the locals live in a huge swamp, that goes on for hundreds of miles, and they just build up areas where they want to put houses, or roads, or rail lines, or cities, or whatever.
In Thailand and Malaysia, they drive on the left side of the road. IN Laos, they drive on the right side of the road. In Vietnam, they drive on both sides of the road. It was a very scary and crazy bus trip. I'm surprised we got out without getting into an accident.
The bus stopped outside of Hanoi, in the middle of the highway, and some guy got one and asked all the falang to get off and get on a mini-bus for the trip to the Old Quarter area of Hanoi, which is where most of the guest houses are. The guy told us that ths big buses can't go downtown into the old quarter, that's why we had to get on this bus. Court turned to me and said something smells fishy, but the mini-bus was free, and it didn't appear we had much choice, so we all went along. Once we started our mini-bus trip to the Old Quarter, the guy started extollling the virtues of his hotel and travel agency. That was the catch, it was a hotel operation, and they were taking us to their hotel, in hopes that we would stay there. Of course, Court and I are easy (and most of the other falang apparently are too), and we stayed there. Our room has a double bed, fan, en-suite washroom with proper hot water tank (for real, high pressure, very hot-water showers!), and satellite TV, so we can watch CNN 24 hours a day of we want! We're paying $7/night. The name of it is the Prince 55 Hotel.
The Old Quarter is very, very nice, Hanoi seems very nice. We had heard so many stories about how bad Vietnam is, how the people are so pushy, in your face, trying to get you to buy stuff, but it's just not like that. It's great! The only bad thing about it is horns. Horns are like play-things to people here, they all love to lay on the horn when they're driving around. The bus-driver we had today was horrible for that, half the time during the long bus ride, the horn was blaring! People love their horns here, and it does get irritating after a while.
Court and I showered, then went for supper with Dana and Dana (from Israel and Korea). They were on the bus with us. Then we walked around the Old Quarter, then for a non-alcoholic drink, then to bed.
I hit an ABM today and withdrew 1,000,000 dong...I'm a millionaire! It's about 10,000dong for $1CDN, so my 1,000,000 was $100CDN. Easy to convert here!
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