After we had packed,
had breakfast in the hostel and checked out, Michael, one of the guys
who works in the hostel, suggested that we walk to the train station
to get our train to Nanning – our jumping-off point for Vietnam –
as it wasn't far. However, by the time we got out to the main road,
he was there waiting with a taxi for us, so we splashed out the £1
it cost to be delivered there in style. At the station, we settled in
to the waiting room and bought some pot noodles and snacks for the
train, as we were expecting to arrive in Nanning after lunch. At
10.30am, we boarded the train, which I was surprised to discover was
a bullet train, a fact that would become significant later.
We found our seats
and were soon hurtling along at 300km/h. At about 12.30pm, we filled
our pot noodles with hot water and started slurping, but we hadn't
managed more than a few mouthfuls when an announcement came over that
we were arriving in Nanning – significantly earlier than we were
expecting (all I can imagine is that it was because the route had
changed from a normal train to a bullet train and no-one had updated
the timetable). We hurriedly gathered up our bags and our food and
then stood on the platform in the 32C+ heat and finished our noodles.
Once we got out of
the station we got our bearings and headed for the travel agent from
whom Kate had bought our tickets to Hanoi. They turned out to be in
an apartment on the 16th floor in the only tall building
in the street. Tickets in hand, we then tried to get a taxi to
the hotel, but every cab we saw was already occupied. We kept walking
and eventually came across a big group of taxis beside the road but
their drivers were all having lunch and weren't interested in taking
a fare. We weren't too far from the hotel by now, so we just put our
heads down and soldiered on, sweat dripping from our brows. We had to
take a detour at one point as the street we wanted to go down was
being dug up so that a new metro could be built. The detour took us
through a big park, which was absolutely heaving with people.
Numerous buskers of various types were entertaining the masses with
some unusual dancing and some pretty awful singing. When we got to
the other side, Kate asked directions from a woman in a shop. She
pointed down the road and Kate asked her about the street that the
hotel was on. The woman just kept pointing down the road and
eventually we just started walking again and almost instantly saw the
hotel.
The hotel was big
and modern, but our room was pretty small, as were the beds, and the
air conditioning wasn't really up to the job. We quickly went through
our bags, pulling out all of our warm clothes so that we could pack
them up and send them to Australia. We then got directions to the
post office and headed back out into the steamy streets and,
eventually, into the steamy post office, where a single
long-suffering woman was helping people to prepare packages of
various sizes. Unlike in Beijing, she didn't speak English, but after
much arm waving and pointing, we managed to get our package away.
Whether it will actually reach Sydney is another matter.
We then went across
the road to a big, shiny shopping mall. As we walked over, a few
drops of rain fell and it looked as thought there was more on the
way. There was some sort of wedding fair going on in the mall and as
we walked among the stalls, the wind began to rise. And rise. And
rise. It just kept getting stronger and stronger until it was a
proper gale blowing through the gap between the buildings, lifting
the tents up and blowing anything that wasn't held down into the air.
I watched as a big Starbucks umbrella flew across the ground and into
the legs of a young woman, almost knocking her over. People started
to scream and there was a crash as a huge glass panel detached from
one of the buildings and shattered on the ground, followed not long
after by another. People were now running all over the place while
others were trying desperately to hold their stalls down. Zoe had got
a free pinwheel from one of the stalls and it was spinning like a
thing possessed. Finally, the wind began to ease off, but then huge,
fat drops of rain started to fall and we mobilised and ran into a
nearby McDonald's. When we re-emerged, the rain had virtually stopped
and the air was calm again.
On our way back to
the hotel, we stopped in at an incredibly sweet little stationery
shop. Kate and I both have a bit of a stationery fetish and we
coveted the wonderful little notebooks, many of which had very sweet
drawings on them and funny little inspirational messages, such as
'Make today the best day of your life', and Love is the greatest
refreshment in life'.
In the evening, we
headed for Nanning's night market, which turned out to be exactly
what we had been looking for in the other cities we've visited – a
proper bustling food market running down a single street, filled with
stalls where people were barbecuing skewers of pork, squid, octopus, fish,
chicken and some sort of splayed out baby bird (pigeon perhaps; I
tried one and am still none the wiser – it was more bone than flesh
and slathered in a strongly flavoured, spicy sauce). We stopped for a
while to watch a woman make what looked sheets of rice noodle on a
piece of cloth stretched over a steaming bath of water. These were
then expertly covered in various toppings, rolled up and presented to
the customer. Unfortunately, the toppings didn't look very appealing
and by the time I had worked up the courage to buy one we were on our
way back out of the market and had passed all of the people selling
them. There were also lots of proper restaurants in the market, which
all displayed their ingredients outside in amazing arrays of seafood,
meat and vegetables. Sarah's a fruit freak, so she was desperate to
try some durian. We didn't want too much, and as we were leaving, she
managed to convince one of the sellers to give her a small amount for
5 yuan and we all tucked in. It was kinda strange, with a sort of a
stringy, plasticky texture and a flavour not dissimilar to banana. It
was almost 10pm by the time we made it back to the hotel.
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