(Editor's note...okay, so it's been over a month since I last wrote about the
Great Vietnamese Train Incident of '06. Sorry about that. I guess I've just been enjoying myself too much for the last month or so. Anyway, I figured I should start this one off by recapping the end of the last entry, so I just copied and pasted the last paragraph. Here are the important facts - we are in a small Vietnamese town...we just missed the train we had tickets for...the last train out of town is leaving in less than a half hour...we have next to no money to buy new tickets...that pretty much sums it up. Here we go.)
The next few minutes are a bit of a blur because, to be honest, the panic was starting to make itself felt. After catching up to the guy who'd walked away from us I was able to assertain that we had a couple of options. We could hop on the back of two motorbikes, fully loaded down with our backpacks, and chase the train to the next stop...a mere 40 kilometers down the road. For the briefest of moments this actually sounded plausible to us. We even went outside the station with the guy and found a couple of motorbike drivers willing to take on the job. Then our sanity returned and we thought about a few pertinent facts of the situation. 1) We didn't have nearly enough money to pay the drivers for the 40 km ride.And really, who wants to stiff a couple of hardened Vietnamese motorbike taxi drivers in a small train station with no one around to hear you scream?? And 2) 40 km on the back of a motorbike with a big backpack in the dark of night on tiny backroads is just not a good idea. So we scrapped that idea and huddled up. We decided our best option was to obtain some cash and buy new tickets on the 9:15, no matter the cost. Naturally I hopped on the back of a motorbike and took off from the train station, leaving Cece there to figure out the situation with the tickets.
As we sped (I say sped...in reality I chose the guy with the slowest motorbike in all of Southeast Asia. An old lady in a walker and a three toed sloth racing two snails passed us on the road) towards town I thought to myself, "Self...this is a little crazy. You just left your wife standing in a railroad station where only one or two people speak any English and you're heading toward town by yourself in an attempt to take enough money out of the ATM to pay a Vietnamese motorbike driver's salary for two or three months". But I told myself it was all worth it because of our extreme desire to get on that train and out of Lao Cai.
After what seemed like an interminable amount of time (probably just five minutes or so) we entered the town and found a bank with an ATM. I hopped off and let out a sigh of relief when I saw the Visa logo on the bank window. I stepped inside and confidently made my way up to the cash machine. I chose to communicate with the machine in English and told it how many dong I needed. After a few seconds of thinking it told me that a connection with my bank could not be made. I just kind of stood there dumbfounded. I reinserted my card and tried again, this time asking for a smaller amount on the withdrawal. Again...nothing. I asked the girl behind the desk (yes, there was actually someone working there at 9:00 at night...Wait, it's 9:00!? The train leaves in fifteen minutes!!) if she could try it. Sure enough, she puts her card in and withdrawals some cash. The ATM works...it just doesn't like me. So this is it. We're stuck here in a town where the ATMs won't take our cards and we're just going to have to become tenant farmers and work till we can afford to buy motorbikes of our own and drive back to the big city on them in a few years. As we left the bank and started back to the train station I looked at my watch. It was 9:10. The train was going to be leaving in ten minutes without us.
When we pulled back up in front of the train station Cece was frantically waving at me and telling me to hurry up. As she pulled me up to the ticket counter I tried to tell her that I wasn't able to get any cash out and that we would just have to start looking for a nice farm to work. She was a bit confused at that statement but she told me that there might be another way to get tickets for the 9:15, which was now getting ready to leave. One of the guys that we had been talking to earlier was saying something about exchanging our tickets for the first train for cheaper tickets on the later train. Poor Cece had this exasperated look on her face like "why didn't you mention this a half hour ago??" but we weren't really in a position to ask questions. Before we knew it, the lady behind the counter handed us a pair of tickets and we were being hurried through the door, just as the guard was locking it up for the night, and made our way to the train. Apparently, the guy with the tickets had called the travel agency who sold us our tickets and they told him to buy us the cheap seats on the later train. Only he didn't bother to mention that to us. The only thing we knew was that we were getting on the train. Surely the worst was over now.
Well, not so fast my friends. We walked through the train to the very last car and found our seats. They were the last two seats in the chair car. The "non air-conditioned, packed to the rafters, we're the only two Westerners in here" chair car. So now all the stories about backpackers getting their passports and cash stolen while they slept started creeping into our heads. We vowed to make it through the night without sleeping and proceeded to set the alarm on our watch to go off every forty-five minutes to ensure we would be awake throughout the ride. Of course I didn't really need the alarm for the first few hours because I was too busy watching the guy who had been eyeing us from the second we got onboard. He looked kind of shady and kept looking back over his shoulder at us. About thirty minutes into the ride he got up and moved into the seat across the aisle from me. So now I'm sure he's just waiting for us to fall asleep so he can grab our possessions and make off like a bandit. After a few minutes of casing the area he whips out his cell phone and starts playing music...really loud music. I start to think, "well, if he is trying to put me to sleep he's not doing a very smart thing, blaring that loud Vietnamese music two feet from my ears". Eventually he stops listening to his cell phone and even nods off a few times. But I still kept my eyes on him.
The next occurence just kept with the theme of strange goings on. When we were scrambling around with the ticket problems before the train left there was another passenger who was in a heated discussion with the train staff. He was a Frenchman (apparently the only Frenchie who likes confrontation...ba-doom boom) who was supposed to be in First Class but had been "relegated" to lowly sleeper class. Anyway, he and Cece had talked about our ticket issues while I was off putting around Lo Cai on the slowest motorbike in Vietnam. After the train started toward Hanoi he came back to the cattle car to find us and see how we were doing. He told me that I should just go find someone who worked on the train and yell at them until they gave us a sleeper room. So I got up with Jacque or Pierre or Henri and went looking for someone to cuss out. Well, I was actually hoping Francis or Thierry or Andre would do the yelling for me and get me a bed to sleep in because at this point I was just too tired to get worked up about anything. After walking the length of the train, we finally found a group of conductors who were just standing around talking. Mr. Frenchy just starts ripping all these folks a new one, demanding a new room for himself and saying he's not leaving until he gets one. He leans over and tells me that I just need to start yelling and I'll get a room too. Of course as soon as I say one word, this little Dragon Lady jumps down my throat and asks to see my tickets. I show her my crappy, back of the train tickets and try to explain that the reason I have these tickets is because there was a mix up with my original tickets and I was supposed to have a sleeping car on the last train. She's not buying any of it. She shoves the tickets back in my hand and just starts shaking her head when I try to ask about getting upgraded. "No! No room for you!" is about all I get out of her. Feeling totally defeated I told Messiour Moulin Rouge that I was done arguing and was just going to head back and see if Cece was still wide awake, staring at the creepy guy across the aisle.
When I got back to our car I had to pick my way through the dark because all the lights had been turned off, even the ones in the little passageway between the cars that was right behind our seats. Cece explained that a conductor had walked to the back of the car, stood right next to her, taken off his shirt and shoes, laid cardboard boxes down in the passageway, turned off the lights, and plopped down to go to sleep! I honestly couldn't believe it. I had to stand up and look through the window to see it for myself. Sure enough, there he was, snoozing away while the greedy thief seated to my right now had the cover of total darkness to plan his mugging. Of course the bandit was pretending to be peacefully asleep and had done a good job of disguising himself as a normal, law abiding train passenger at this point. He was good I tell you...good.
Finally, Cece and I gave in and started to nod off in short little naps. Of course every forty-five minutes the watch alarm went off, waking us and all the people within ten feet of us (I'm certain we were very popular with our fellow travellers). Once, about ten minutes past God-knows-when, the lights came on throughout the car and a crew of four or five conductors started working their way through the crowd, back toward our area. I was thinking, "surely they aren't going to start checking tickets now". But seriously, so many bizarre things had happened so far that night I was ready for anything. Anyway, the conductors came all the way through the car, opened up the door behind us and started to wake their comatose co-worker with subtle foot nudges (I volunteered to help out) and teasing taunts. After a while he awoke, groggily stood and re-dressed, and followed the other conductors out the way they came in. As soon as he was gone I hopped up and turned the light back on in the passageway. No way was I gonna let that thief/nice man next to me get any sleep tonight! Cece and I laughed as we pictured the lazy conductor getting chewed out for sleeping on the job. Maybe they'd even fire him on the spot and toss him off the train at the next town we went through. Just as we decided that they had made him start to clean up all the appalling bathrooms on the train for his transgressions he walked back in the car, strode past us, took off his shirt again, turned off the lights, and went right back to sleep in his little "bed". So much for swift justice.
The rest of the night was rather uneventful. We nodded off a few times, only to be awakened by our trusty watch alarm. Upon arrival in Hanoi we flagged down a couple of motorbike drivers to take us back to the travel agency that sold us the train tickets. After waiting three hours for the owner to show up (the train got into town around five am) we demanded a refund for our mis"printed" train tickets and argued for a while about whose fault it was. Finally we got about $18 back and decided that was the best deal we were going to get.
Thus concludes the lengthy and totally accurate account of the Great Vietnamese Train Incident of '06. Now, if you think this sounds like the travel day from Hades, just wait till I tell you all about last Saturday and our one car, five train, one bus, one minivan with a stranger seven hour struggle to get 200 km from Cologne to Rotterdam in order to catch a ferry to England. Ho hum, just another day in paradise.
