Tuesday 14 July 2015

Day 260: Back on tracks, part 10

We mostly just hung out in the hotel this morning, waiting until just before check out time at 12pm to go downstairs with our bags, which we left with reception. Then, unencumbered, we walked down to where the night market had been last night to see if we could find something for lunch (stopping on the way to buy a few of the wonderful little notebooks we had seen in the stationery shop last night). There was a food market on in the adjacent street, and we found a little shop selling barbecue and roast pork, and we bought a little of each to tide us over. (And a bearded dragon sitting on the seat of a parked motorcycle... Hmmm...)





The shoes I chose to bring on this leg of the trip are incredibly comfortable but they have definitely seen better days. They smelled pretty bad when we left and they have a powerful reek now; the laces have started to perish and have snapped several times, so I've had to tie knots in them to keep them together. All of which is to say that it was high time that I got a new pair of shoes – and next to the food market, Kate found a great little shoe shop, where I bought a new pair of what certainly seemed to be genuine Vans for not very much at all.

We still hadn't found anywhere to have lunch, so we walked back up to the shopping mall where the squall had hit yesterday and the girls got burgers at McDonald's. We then went back to the crazy park (stopping off to buy some more notebooks...), but it was a bit too crazy even for us, so Kate and the girls went back to the hotel while I went for one last wander around in China. 



Now, on our first full day in China, we stopped into a little supermarket to buy some drinks. I chose something from the fridge – something called calamansi juice. I didn't know what a calamansi was, but the other drinks in the range were a lemon and a grapefruit, so I figured it was a type of citrus and as the writing was green, I figured it was a type of lime (it is, I think – it may be a lime/kumquat hybrid). Suffice to say it was absolutely delicious and from that day on, during our various wanderings, the girls and I were always on the lookout, peering into every shop fridge we saw, for 'cold calamansi'. A positive sighting was usually accompanied by a purchase followed by a general guzzling. And so, on this, my last day in China, I bought one more bottle of cold calamansi for old times' sake (and some barbecued pork).


Back in the hotel, I undertook the ceremonial disposal of my rancid old shoes and the inauguration of my lovely new Vans. Then we grabbed our bags and enquired about getting a taxi to the bus station. The hotel staff didn't speak a lot of English, so we thought we must be hitting a language barrier when they replied, but we eventually figured out that they really were telling us that the train station was too close for a taxi – the drivers would refuse to take the fare. This seemed ludicrous – what taxi driver refuses a fare, no matter how small? – but they were insistent and one of them took us out to the street and ushered us onto the bus, which took us past the station and down a side road for some considerable distance before dropping us off (this, too, seemed ludicrous to me – why is the nearest bus stop to the train station several hundred metres from it?). 


At the station we bought some snacks and then settled in to wait for the train to Hanoi, which duly arrived at 6.10pm. By then, a huge crowd had formed at the ticket barrier, but we noticed a woman near us show her tickets and pass through a side gate. We quickly gathered up our stuff and tried the same and sure enough, we were ushered through and were soon safely ensconced in our little compartment. 


About four hours later, we arrived at Chinese border control, where we all had to get out, with our bags, and get our passports stamped. When we got back on the train, we quickly climbed into bed to try to get some sleep before we got to Vietnamese border control. Kate went back to reading her book, however. She had got hold of a copy of The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, a great big brick of a book, at the apartment in UB, and I had said at the time that she would probably be reading it by the time we reached Vietnam. But she only had a few pages to go and quickly finished it off to prove me wrong.

At midnight, we were awoken by a knock on the door and started to gather up our things again. Poor old Zoe was completely zonked and quickly fell back to sleep while sitting up on her bunk and then started to get undressed as I tried to get her up and out. Up to this point we've been travelling on our British passports but we got our Vietnamese visas in our Australian passports as it meant that we could save some time by having two applications under way at the same time. But we were slightly nervous about leaving China on one passport and arriving in Vietnam on another. When I handed the passports over to the official, he spent some time flicking through, looking for something and eventually barked 'Chinese stamp!' at me. I grabbed the British passports and handed them to him and he was quickly mollified (and we all breathed a sigh of relief).

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