Back to Beyond

Well, we thought we were finished with Hanoi, but we had not really paid enough attention to the timing of a couple of transportation items: the Ha Long Bay cruise spit us back out into the Ha Long port at 11:00 am, it was about 2.5 hours to Hanoi, but our overnight train to Lao Cai in the northern Sa Pa region did not leave until 10:30 pm. So we had another afternoon and evening in Hanoi.

Did I say overnight train? You may have read that and conjured up an image of something from the Orient Express – an elaborate suite with comfortable upholstered seats made up later by an attentive porter into a luxurious bed with 300 thread count linens and silver or gold fittings everywhere, including the cleverly included commode. Conjure away. I know we did. The reality was a slightly funky main train station, most of which was built by the French in a kind of Beaux Arts meets Colonial style but with a main section redesigned by some Soviet architect moonlighting from his job designing bank vaults or military defences. Followed by our arrival at our train, which was not built this century or, perhaps, the last. Wood veneer panelling in the extremely narrow European style corridor, down one side of the car with all the cabins on the other. We had arranged to have a four person cabin to ourselves, and flung open the door prepared to flounce in and consider where to put our bags, but were a bit stymied by the fact that it had been made up as a double bed – instead of two singles – by putting a board with a double ”mattress” apparently seeking the world’s record for thinnest, across the benches on each side and the space in between. When the door slid open, that left exactly as much room as two people occupy when standing shoulder to shoulder with their bags still in the corridor Saying “WTF” and wondering where the hell they are going to put anything. And the cleverly included commode? Fuggedaboudit. End of the corridor. Huh. But we dropped one of the upper berths into position as our staging area, crawled across the platform into sleeping position, imagined we were wearing pyjamas, and slept while the train ambled north…

But, again, I digress. The point of this post was that we had an afternoon and evening in Hanoi that we had not really focussed on before it happened. So we walked and watched and soaked up the street life. We came across two very different haircuts happening on the street – our guide had told us earlier that if you want good, you go to a barbershop or salon, but if you want cheap you go to a street service – only about CAD$6 but if the police show up at the end of the block both you and the barber have to leg it. We saw guys drinking beer and smoking (tobacco, I think) in their huge bamboo bong, we saw a man with a snare drum accompanying a woman with a microphone in a small street singing random karaoke, we saw men playing some sort of gambling board game on the sidewalk and, best off all, while having maybe the best cup of flower/herbal/ginger tea imaginable in the Old Quarter, we saw not only a new refrigerator being delivered on the back of a small motorcycle but also, moments later, the old refrigerator being strapped across the back of an aged bicycle and ridden away into the afternoon traffic. It was a full afternoon. Hasta la vista, Hanoi.