An early start today, as we were woken up at 6:30am in order to eat breakfast before climbing to the top of Ti Top Island. With its 400+ steps, Ti Top Island offers panoramic views of Ha Long Bay from the top. It’s a hell of a climb, but it beats the stair-master any day for the rewards at the top. Don’t tell that to the French tourists, though; they didn’t stop complaining all the way up and all the way down. But the rest of us climbed, huffed, puffed and trudged our way up there to get the views.
The boat arrived back at the harbour late in the morning, and thus concluded our trip to Ha Long Bay. We made the four-hour drive back to Hanoi, getting back to town by mid-afternoon.
In my so-called wisdom, instead of booking another night in Hanoi to rest up, I instead had arranged a ticket on the overnight train to Hue. Yes, after spending a full week in the North of Vietnam, I’ve decided that it’s time to head south, towards the central coast area of the country. Despite the beautiful scenery and pleasantly cool temperatures up north, I’ve yet to see the sun on this trip. And since I fly out of Saigon in just over a week, it’s high time to brave the heat and hit the road.
The 13-hour train ride was scheduled to depart at 7pm, so I had just enough time to go back to the hostel, pick up my bags, get some water and snacks for the train, and make it to the train station to get on board. Since I’m awesome, I even fit in one more tourist attraction in that time period — a quick visit to Hoa Lo, also known as the “Hilton Hotel” Prison. In the west, it’s famous as the prison where captured American pilots and other PoWs were locked up during the war. In Vietnam, that story is a mere footnote compared to the many years when the prison was used by its original French builders to house Vietnamese revolutionaries and political prisoners. The exhibit is one-sided, to be sure; most of the prison tells the story of the heroic Vietnamese prisoners and the horrible conditions in which they were kept by the French colonialists, and a small room tacked on at the end of the exhibit like a footnote shows how the American PoWs were so “lucky” to be imprisoned by the wonderful Vietnamese, and is full of photos of Americans smiling, playing chess and volleyball, writing letters home, and celebrating Christmas. No mention of the accounts of torture and terrible conditions that many American veterans reported. They did feature John McCain’s flight suit in a big glass case, mind you.
After that, I was really cutting it close on time, so I grabbed my bags and rushed over to the train station. My overnight train wasn’t quite as nice as the ones to Sapa; this one was smaller, the bathrooms were kind of gross, and I spotted more than a few cockroaches crawling around. This is Asia; that’s not as unusual as it seems. Even the nice hotels can have problems with cockroaches. My 4-person berth included two girls from Germany and a guy from Uzbekistan. Yep, I have now officially met someone from Uzbekistan. Definite highlight of my train journey.
It’s hard to believe that my trip is already half over. It feels like I just got here.