Many things went wrong from Hanoi city to Lao Cai - the border city and the gateway to China, actually it was one long nightmare. It's only 300 km journey but it took us 3 days to do it.
It all began while going to the wrong Bus station (there are more than 4 different bus stations) in Hanoi, due to a misleading information by our hotel manager, that took us lots of time and money. After getting rid of the many of the touts at the bus station, we arrived to the right one at 9:30 (2 hours late), here we had to deal with other 1 millions touts and other kind of leeches. Eventually we found the bus to Lao Cai or at least as it has been told to us, after making sure (asking the driver several of times) this is the right bus.
Of course they over charged us by asking 6 times more the price for a bus ticket. The price dropped when we insist, but not as the local price, we paid as they demand since we had no choice, they were about to throw us with the bags from the bus in the middle of god only knows if not paying them, we were hopeless.
In the middle of the way we have been transferred to a different bus, saying this new bus goes to Lao Cai, but the truth is this bus went to a different town called:"Yen Bai".
We realized all was one big show to trick us and get our money.
We found ourselves all of a sudden in a town which was not even shown in our "Lonely Planet" travel guide book, we were hopeless in a middle of nowhere, while nobody speak English.
In Yen Bai we found accommodation and the day after, we arrived again to the bus station at 12:45 to catch the bus to Lao Cai as we have been told, well, we got the tickets and thought all of this behind us but a few minutes later we realized the bus has been cancelled.
We had no choice to head to the train station and buy tickets for 3 AM at night.
The train was much worse than expected, it turned out that our tickets were for hard seats, and it was really hard, we couldn't sleep all night long.
Eventually we decided to cancel our last destination in Vietnam and go back to China sooner than we planned. We had enough of Vietnam.
In Lao Cai we went straight to the border, after changing our last Vietnamese dongs to Chinese Yuans, we found ourselves at the Chinese border town - Hekou in no time.
Immediately we caught a bus back to Kunming, 11.5 hours.
After 24 hours of nothing but sitting, our ass killed us.
Have fun,
Efrat and Yoni.
Our New Photo Album: http://picasaweb.google.com/yoni.efrat
Our Old Photo Album: http://picasaweb.google.com/yonifln
Our Movie Library: http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=yonifln
No comments:
Post a Comment