Hanoi

We've been in Hanoi now for a couple days.

The 31 hour train trip was ok. At one point there was a big thump - big enough so that a water bottle fell and hit Kim waking her up. Then after about 5 min the train stopped completely and there was a very long announcement in Vietnemese. We were sharing our compartment with two and a half - one was a toddler - but they did not speak English so could not tell us what happened. The lady under my bunk made a chopping motion on her neck so I interpreted that to mean either a suicide, or that the engine on the train had been killed.

Later another Vietnamese guy came and visited the guy under Kim's bunk who told us that the train hit and killed a motorcyclist and dragged him for awhile. That was too bad.

The visitor also wanted me to give him my ticket after I was done using it. I agreed, but didn't know why he wanted my ticket. I figured it was some kind of fraud and, later, thought I should have said "no, unless you can tell me why".

When leaving the station, the attendants punched his ticket but were careful to actually take our ticket. Our guy wasn't happy but I wasn't going to go and insist that the attendents give me my expired ticket so I could give it to a stranger. So there was some sort of scam there.

We got into a taxi from the station because we had our big backpacks. However the cabby went around the old city lake - we knew our hotel was between the station and the lake and not requiring a scenic tour around the lake. Plus Kim was watching the meter and it was clicking Kilometers inconsistenly (popping) at maybe at a rate of 5x the actual distance. Ie we would go 20 meters and it clicked 100 meters. So forced the cab to stop confronted the driver and gave him 50,000 dong instead of the 74,000 on the cab.

Since that incident we have got into some good cabs and another one that required a confrontation and early exit (this time I only gave the guy 20,000 dongs instead of the 54,000 and climbing). Fortunately we have found that the little cabs seem to all have doctored meters, while a couple companies (minh linh - white cabs with green lettering and hanoi taxi) have reliable meters. So if we look for a cab, we usually wait for a white one with green lettering. In a white and green cab I think the cost from the station to our hotel the first night would have been 15,000 dong. So in the end my giving the original scammer 50,000 dong was pretty generous.

We had a pretty busy day yesterday visiting the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum complex, the Hoa Lo Prison museum and a water puppet show.

Ho Chi Minh specifically requested a cremation, but he is a national hero so after his death they locked him away in a huge monument to his life.

The Hoa Lo Prison (aka Hanoi Hilton) is the same prison that John McCain stayed at during the Vietnemese war. The story of the museum was more about how the French colonists had tortured and violated the revolution's comrades before and during Vietnam's independence struggle in the 50s. Regarding the American's held there in the 60s and 70s, they portrayed that the exact same prison had turned into more as a summer camp with volleyball tournaments and sing alongs. The displays show one side of the story, but at least that side of the story makes us want to know the other side of the story.

The water puppet show was really cool. The had these wooden puppets and would use a bamboo screen and a pool of water to hide the puppets and then tell little stories. Some of the scenes were pretty cute with a little guy swimming after a fish, then doing a backstroke. You had to be there. It's funny to watch a puppet doing a backstroke in the water. There was also a scene where two birds, possibly phoenixes, got together and then an egg popps out of the water, then they get together around the egg and then a baby bird pops out.

Today we took a white and green cab to the Van Mieu temple of literature (the country's first university and then went to a fair trade store called Craft Link. For lunch we took a white and greed to this crazy hofbrauhaus.

Tomorrow we are going on a two day kayak and mountain bike tour in Ha Long Bay. A pretty place near to Hanoi and the ocean (the bay).