There are two different types of sleeper buses. One type has double beds along the sides of the aisle, or the "cuddle bus" as I like to call it. The one I took to Hanoi was the other type; similar to the one I took to Nha Trang. I call it the bobsled bus cause each person sleeps in these isolated compartments that are never terribly wide. More personal space, but less space.
My sled was pretty uncomfortable, but I managed to doze off for the bulk of the trip. When I awoke, it was daybreak and the bus was cruising through some real run-down territory. All the buildings were made of dusty concrete and trash was piled up in every conceivable nook. It looked like Fallujah. 'Dear god, I'm in a different country' I thought. I hoped that the bus wasn't stopping. Honestly, Myanmar looked better than whatever godforsaken hellhole I was driving through at that time.
Soon the traffic started to swell and the streets widened. The bus stopped on the side of an expressway that dug through Hanoi and let us all off. It looked marginally beter, albeit quite chaotic. Capital city so what do you expect? I played the usual game of "who can find Jon the cheapest room?" with the motorbike drivers and one guy said he knew one for $6. Done. Off we went into the cramped, messy neighborhood.
Vendors sprawled their territory out in front of buildings leaving only enough room for a few motorbikes to squeeze in between. Raw meat was being washed in basins and hacked apart on makeshift tables. There were puddles of water and dripping awnings all along the patholed road, even though it hadn't rained. Nowhere was there space for a pedestrian to walk that wasn't in the way of the throngs of motorbikes trying to pass, each honking their horn viciously. And garbage. Lots of garbage. Way too full-on for my morning state.
My guesthouse was right at the heart of the mess. The owner took me to my cheap room up 5 flights of stairs. The door was almost half the size of the others and the ceiling was probably just 6 feet high. Another quirky room in a big Vietnamese city. There were two beds again.
I actually got a good sleep on the bus, so rather than passing out, I showered, shaved and immediately set out to obtain my Chinese visa. See, I had originally planned to fly into Hong Kong and get it there, but the funds were getting tight, and I planned on making it to Tibet, so I opted to get the visa in Hanoi and book it up Vietnam and into Yunnan directly. A little detour, but plans were always loose this far into the trip.
Back out into the mess, it wasn't hard finding a motorbike. It was hard trying to communicate where I wanted to go however. I got the price down from 50,000 to 15,000 dong. I arrived and the gates were closed. It was noon. The sign in front read 2-6, 8:30 - 12:00, which seemed odd, but I nonetheless interpreted as 8:30 - 6 with a two hour lunch break in the middle, just like the Vietnamese embassy in Sihanoukville. So I had two hours to kill. It turns out Ho Chi Minh's embalmed body was lying in state a few blocks away, so I set off to check that out. It was unusually quiet. 'Open 8 - 11' I read. Dammit, what terrible hours.
So I kicked stones around and visited a 'Literature Temple' that was all kinds of boring until 2. When I returned to the embassy, it was still closed. It turns out 2 - 6 is their way of saying Monday to Friday and the gates were only open from 8:30 to 12, almost the same piss poor hours to Ho Chi Minh mausoleum had. How frustrating!
So I spent the rest of the day with a map walking around the city. It was a whole lot nicer outside of the district I was staying in, which happened to be both the Old Quarter and the backpacker ghetto. The streets were wider and cleaner and there was much more vegetation. I crossed some dodgy intersections then got hungry. I found a wealth of Western restaurants but they were all very expensive. I concluded that I had walked into the 'affluent tourist district'. Finally I found somewhere reasonable and sat for a sandwich.
While sitting, a book seller came up to me and I made the mistake of briefly checking out his wares. He had the Lonely Planet China, which I needed, so I had a look. Upon opening and examining the book, it became clear that it was photocopied quite poorly and the maps were illegible. I had already haggled him down a good deal before making this discovery, so when I said I that I didn't want it, he threw a fit. "I am very angry!" he kept screaming while banging on the table. I told him to calm down and that there was no reason to be angry while he kept trying to force the book upon me through his wrath. I told him that I wasn't going to be intimidated into buying his book, very calmly, which was surprising cause I was in a pretty foul mood prior to even talking to this guy. He said a bunch of stuff about "stupid tourists" and how we should "never come to Vietnam" before switching gears and talking about his four children and how his family died in the Vietnam War. I had no idea what to make of it, I just didn't want to book so I gave him my sympathies, told him not to be angry, paid my bill and left. Looking back, I think I handled it well. I didn't get angry, and if I gave in, I would have had a useless book and possibly justified his demented sales tactics.
I continued my walk around a lake in the center of town. I passed a few vintage camera stores and looked to see if they had any Rolleis. The only one I found was very very old and $600 so I had no choice but to pass it up. Sigh.
I checked out the famed 'Hanoi Hilton' briefly and was treated to a schlocky display of how brutal and ruthless the French were and how kindly and humane the Vietcong were. There was plenty of spooky music you can bet. Next I stopped for ice cream in this packed hellhole of a shop before realizing why it was so packed: the ice cream was fantastic!
Next I happened upon the National Water Puppet Theater, so out of natural curiosity, I stopped in. Water puppetry, I learned, was an art conceived by rice farmers as a way to entertain friends and family on the rice fields. Kind of like marionettes, except they are controlled from below by a mechanism which skirts them through a pool of shallow water. I was interested to see how this could possibly be entertaining.
The orchestra came out and played a few Vietnamese warm-up numbers. They were quite talented. Soon, the puppets came puddling out and danced around like, well, puppets. The water provided some neat advantages to traditional puppetry, but otherwise it was a little hokey. Maybe I should have bought a program. Ultimately, the orchestra was the best part.
I returned to the Old District, satisfied with the fact that I managed to salvage the day with water puppets, arguments and ice cream. I ended up picking up a legit copy of Lonely Planet China from a used book store and FINALLY getting rid of the Boy in the Striped Pajamas. I ate dinner on a plastic stool by the side of the road for cheap before heading back to the guesthouse,
Next morning I woke up early and went to the embassy. the gates were open. Yes. Inside I was told that foreigners could not get Chinese visas in Hanoi and that I had to go to Ho Chi Minh City. NO. Since when can you get a visa from a consulate in a city that's nowhere near the border, but not from the actual embassy in the capital city itself? Failed again! "Oh well" I thought, "Ho Chi Minh's pickled corpse should cheer me up". Nope! I read the fine print: 'April - October, open 8:00 - 10:30. It was 10:30. Deja vu from yesterday.
Discouraged, I went back to the Old Quarter. No more walkarounds. It was too hot anyways. I booked a tour of Ha Long Bay for the next day and then spent time in my surprisingly air-conditioned room drawing up my plan of attack for China. The only time I left was to go get dinner and an alarm clock, which I sorely needed at that point. I had enough of the swirling tangled mess of Hanoi that was literally right on my doorstep and clearly audible from my room. The air-conditioning was the first I'd had the whole trip so I reveled in it. I set my new alarm clock for 7am and went to bed.
The water puppets.
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