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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