Sorry for the lateness of these posts - We have been meaning to write a post for the island adventures we have been on but we have been delayed by power outages, storms, no wifi, and wanting sleep more than write. These excuses to not have the post ready make it sound like we have had a tough past few days, but it has been quite the opposite. They will be posted soon.
Today has been a day full of travel. We woke up in Cat Ba Island early this morning and waited for a bus to pick us up. The bus took us to the western port on this island, from which we took a boat back to Haiphong, followed by a bus ride to Hanoi. This was nothing too exciting - we just retraced the steps we took to get to the island.
Once arriving in Hanoi we needed to book some bus tickets to bring us up north for our motorbiking loop we have planned in the Ha Giang province. We were sad to see that the bus station we were dropped off at was 15km away from the station we had to book our tickets at, so we negotiated a taxi ride that wasn’t completely unreasonable, and made our way through the city.
We arrived at My Dinh bus station, and were worried about the process of finding the tickets ourselves. We scanned the station, and saw that there were signs with locations above booths. We found Ha Giang and its booth, and asked the woman in the booth for tickets. Luckily it was a very easy process, and we got the correct tickets cheaply and quickly.
We then had a few hours until our bus, so in need of food we asked a motorbike taxi to bring us to the nearest mall, and decided to see what they had. We were able to find a large shopping mall near us, and while walking around it looking for food, and ATMs to get money for our trip up north, we saw that they had a movie theater. Wanting a little break of relaxation during our busy day of travel we grabbed some food, and then booked tickets for X-Men, which we hoped would be in english. We went into X-Men to find that it was in english, and it was also quite crowded. We are not sure whether or not the Vietnamese viewers missed parts of the movie in translation, but they seemed to love it, and we thought it was a decent movie. It was a good break from the day, and the tickets cost about half what they would have at home.
We returned to the bus station after the movie and walked into a nearby convenience store to get some snacks for the bus ride. We were approached by a 16 year old Vietnamese kid whose dad ran the store. He spoke decent english and helped us find some food we wanted, and we began chatting more. We ended up sitting down with him for about 45 minutes talking to him about what it’s like living in Vietnam, and what it’s like living in America. He explained that he had only been learning english for a year, and we were the first Americans he had been able to talk to in the bus station. It was very interesting talking to him, and as we chatted his parents brought us iced tea, and ended up giving us a discount on our groceries, and some free water. He revealed a lot about Vietnam and its school system and what it’s like growing up here, and we learned a lot talking to him. Once our bus arrived we were shown where to go to find it, and took off our shoes and hopped into its big seats, and settled in for the journey, excited for the adventure ahead.
-Ben