If you don't remember (because I sure as heck didn't), last episode was about our super awesome bazillion mile trek through a bunch of villages around Sa Pa. We met a puppy who would grow up to become dinner, a bunch of friendly LOWs (little old women) who walked virtually the entire way with us, saw endless beautiful views of rice terraces, and finished the day with a great Italian dinner.
The next morning was the our final day in Vietnam. Really it was the second to last day but the impending overnight train ride made it feel like the start of a single 48 hour day. Actually more like 72 hours when you add in the flights back to Seattle. I haven't done the exact math to see how many full days the entire ordeal took because it would blow up my brain.
We started the day with a short trip to Sung's village. There were some sweet deals on knock-off Northface stuff there. Jenny bought a purple jacket because... well it was purple, what do you expect? We probably bought some other souvenirs too that are now sitting in bags in our basement along with the souvenirs from Singapore two years ago. Actually, I guess they aren't sitting there anymore because our basement flooded a couple days ago (foreshadowing to a future blog post?).
After walking around the village for a couple hours it was time to head to the hotel, take a quick shower and prepare for the journey home.
First up was conquering the overnight train ride. If you remember, the train to Sa Pa wasn't terrible, it was just a few hours late. Well, the train ride back to Hanoi was terrible. No, it was worse than that. In the future when I'm trying to find something terrible to use as an analogy I'll use, "it was almost as bad as an overnight train from Sa Pa to Hanoi when the air conditioning breaks halfway through and the nearest window is jammed shut and you end up having to stand by the bathroom for the majority of the trip to avoid sweating out all the moisture in your body and turning into a human raisin." Because that's what happened.
In the middle of the night I woke up because our tiny little cabin was sweltering and stuffy except a more extreme version of those words. I got up to try to find some train attendant to see if they could turn on the air conditioning. A couple things made this difficult though. First, it was the middle of the night and and there isn't exactly a "flight attendant call button". Second, I don't speak Vietnamese and most Vietnamese people don't speak English. I was feeling adventurous though so I set out to find myself some AC.
As I said before, these train rides are not smooth. If it was an airplane, we would have been experiencing extreme turbulence for the vast majority of the trip. That, compounded with my half asleep overheated delirium made simply walking down the train aisle a bit of a challenge. But because I'm a hero, I eventually tracked down someone who looked official.
Through a series of hand gestures and sweat running down my face, I successfully communicated that it was too hot and that he should turn on the AC. He messed with some controls and gave me a thumbs up. Feeling pretty proud of myself, I staggered back to our cabin and climbed into bed, ready to be revel in the cool air. Except it was still twelve bajillion degrees. After a couple minutes it was clear that there was no change in the AC situation and I set out again to seek help.
The same dude tried to help me again. He fiddled with some more buttons and knobs and eventually got up and left. At the time I hoped he had gone to get more help, but in retrospect, I'm pretty sure he realized there was no fixing the AC and just wanted to get away from the sweaty American who was going to continue pestering him.
When it became obvious that he wasn't coming back, I switched into survival mode. Until then, my survival skills mostly consisted of insuring that my seat and tray table were their full upright and locked positions. So figuring out how to survive another few hours on a train that was a little warmer than I would have liked it was going to be a challenge. Good thing I excel under pressure.
First, I tried to find an open window. The window by our cabin was jammed shut so I walked another few feet down the hall. That ingenuity proved valuable because there was an open window a little farther down the hall by the bathroom. I set up camp there for the next few hours until Jenny came looking for me. We discussed the uncomfortably warmness of the train and decided that if we really wanted to get any kind of airflow, we were going to have to find a way to open the jammed window by our cabin.
Any day now I expect Obama to award me a congressional medal of honor for my heroics in getting that window open.
There were several problems. First, it was locked. And I'd already scared away the attendant in our car by asking him to fix the air conditioning. Time was of the essence so I quickly searched for something that could be used to pick the lock. A toothbrush. Bingo. Taking advantage of my exceptional finger dexterity, honed by years of video games, I used the toothbrush to pick the lock on the window. But it still wouldn't open. Some metal latch was still jamming it shut. To tackle that problem, I grabbed my earplugs that were tied together with a piece of string. Or as I like to call it, a window un-jammer. Using the string to get some leverage on the latch, I was able to free the window, push it open and get a face full of still-pretty-uncomfortably-warm-Vietnamese-air. But it was better than nothing. Probably.
Our adventure home didn't end there though. We survived the rest of the barely bearable train ride, killed a couple hours in Hanoi and went back to the hotel to catch a taxi to the airport. Since any automobile bigger than a motorbike is a novelty in Vietnam, it shouldn't have surprised us when our taxi driver showed up a small sedan expecting to fit four adults with a weeks worth of luggage each. Spoiler alert, we didn't fit. He called for a bigger car but who knows how long it would take to get there. We waited for a while but eventually had to split up and go. Since Jenny and my flight was first, we jumped in the car that was ready and sped off to the airport. Sped off in Vietnam is relative though since it's impossible to go much faster than 15 mph anywhere due to the amoeba of motorbikes that take up every square inch of roadway.
But we ended up being fine. We caught our flight. It was long. Made it to Taipei. The layover was really long. Got on our next flight to Seattle. It was longer still.
Travelling halfway around the world takes a while. Especially when you're starting in a super rural town in the remote mountains of Vietnam. But looking back it's actually kind of amazing that through half a dozen different modes of transportation over the course of a few days the biggest impediment was broken air conditioning. First world problems indeed.
The trip was a blast. The world is a big freaking place. On to the next adventure.
