Hanoi and the Visa Fiasco

Woken once again by the driver turning on really bad (music-for-deaf people) Vietnamese music very loudly at all of about 6am! Didn't arrive until an hour later when we headed to the recommended hotel. Bar the smells and noises of the market which we later discovered started promptly at 6.30am it was kind of OK! Darling Backpacker Guest House - the salesman/receptionist is a bit of a dick if you don't go buying his overpriced tours and visas!

We set out to get the China visa sorted. It was all going OK until we realised our Vietnamese Visas didn't last a month from when you enter the country, but a month from when it was intially valid. I was fuming as I'd checked that point three or four times with the TAT office we bought the visas from in Thailand and they'd assured us we'd get 30 days from when we entered. We'd have been quicker through Cambodia if we'd known. Amazing how Thailand idiots can bite you in the arse months after leaving the country.

So, in the end, as we'd also found a cheap place for trips we bought a Vietnam extension ($25 beats the $100 fine at the border for overstaying!), a China Visa, a Halong Bay Tour, a Sapa Tour and even arragned for our passports to be delivered to us in Sapa so we didn't have to do that journey 3 times. We'll see if that works out!

3 hours later we were done and after the attentions of a Vietnamese lady getting us to post for a photo with her state-of-the-art fruit tranportation device and making a significant score finding The Magus in a bookshop which amazingly had every book listed on computer, we headed back for some much-needed kip.

Jenni found us that evening after her taxi driver had taken them to a compltely different hotel, not ours as promised - the whole commission thing takes over again! We got some fresh mugshots taken as te Chinese Embassy said they needed some more-clear and handsom photos than the ones we'd already given! The cheek!!

After some woman-whinging about where we were going as we wanted to have a wander first we found an ex-pat place where we made sure we left a note for everyone to give Martin a wink and a kiss tomorrow if they saw him, life-like sketch included! We wandered the streets and bumped into a few more of Jenni's friends who were just about to fly home and then hit the Bia Hois. Either mass inflation had hit the nation or Hanoi thinks its beer is superior as they were charging 2000 dong a glass - that's 6000 a litre, up from 3500 in Saigon & now totalling just over 11p a pint - extortion! Rice popadom things dipped in chilli were great and also a steal at 1000 each (3.3p)!