After our Sapa-trekking adventure (in the photo: me and my new plastic shoes :-D) , we had to go back to Hanoi, our gateway to Halong Bay. We decided to take an overnight bus, rather than the train.

The bus arrived with a 20 minute delay. The pictures of the bus looked promising though… shiny red soft and adjustable couches. Together with three other foreigners we got into our beds and prepared for the night. The TV in front showed clips of half naked women dancing on poles and loud disco music was pounding through the stereo’s, which off course, were located right above our heads. This was going to be a ‘partybus’.

The bus left at 7PM and stopped in Lao Cai again. We stood still as more and more people were getting on. So far, everything was going pretty smooth. A few hours later, the bus stopped again. Liz and I went for our bathroom-breaks but found nothing resembling a toilet. A Vietnamese lady saw us and pointed into the black night. She led us to the back, pointed somewhere in front of her. All we could see were a few low shacks until we finally found a hole in the ground. Literally, a hole, with two cement blocks in front of it to put your feet on. No door, no toilet paper, no flush. I’m used to these kinds of toilet and wasn’t really bothered by it. But what did bothered me, was that, as I placed my feet on the cement blocks and aimed for the hole, I heard the sound of a frog, and it sounded as if it was coming from right underneath me. With my pants half down, I hurried out of the toilet.

We got into the bus again, but it didn’t leave. Instead, the driver apparently liked the sound of the engine being turned on and off, as if he was tormenting us. This went on for about an hour and finally the engine stayed on and the bus took off. I occasionally dozed off, but also noticed our bus was stopping an awful lot of times. It eventually got stuck in a traffic jam due to a road blockage. After nearly three hours of standing still, we took off again only to stop again for food and picking up the next round of passengers.

Off course, these people didn’t have seats, so he tried to persuade the three of us that this stop was actually Hanoi and that we had to get off here. Fortunately, we weren’t that gullible, since that stop was kind of in the middle of nowhere. Meanwhile, the same Vietnamese song had been blasting through the stereo for about an hour, when we finally got to Hanoi with a 7-hour delay, sleep deprived, a huge head ache and in no mood at all to haggle over taxi prices at the bus station.

When we got to our hostel, we took a nice long hot shower and had a huge pizza! We were also looking forward to doing some more shopping at the Dong Xuan Nightmarket in the center of Hanoi. We had been there during our first night here, but then, it had been extremely crowded and humid. The night market is huge and has almost everything a girl can dream of: bags, shoes, clothes, sunglasses etc…

Tonight, we were ready to get some more of those cheap goods (even cheaper than china)! The night market was going to start at 7PM, one gentleman on a scooter told us. So, at 7.30PM, we get there…finding nothing. We ask around: ‘Nightmarket? Where are the shops?’ No one seems to know… We ask again in broken English, so they would understand us better: ‘shops? Outside?’ They all looked at us as if we were from another planet. I felt like an idiot. Were we in the wrong street? Was this some kind of strange hidden camera show? Eventually, we found someone who actually understood what we were talking about and told us the market only occurs on weekends. Good thing we were coming back to Hanoi two days later, Friday evening!
We would have to save our shopping-desire for a few days.