Anyway, by some miracle I was able to get some sleep in that ridiculous van. Maybe I got 4 hours, maybe not. Woke up in time to watch the sun, or the gray, come up in the morning and walk around a little. We were on some ratty little dirt road with rice farms all around us. After waiting for a few hours, a troupe of local hill tribe girlscame by with shovels and a pack of buffalo, I guess to clear the road. It was fun to see that - I was surprised that they were wearing traditional clothes - I had really assumed they just wore it for the tourists at this point, but there you go. And for good measure, another bulldozer showed up soon after (I had heard that the previous bulldozer got covered in a mudslide). And after an hour or so, on we went! and the sun came out! I was very optimistic and said, foolishly, "this is the day we make it to Hanoi!" So we drove about 15 minutes to the next town (we could have walked that in an hour i think, if it wasn't dark and absurdly dangerous.) And our long haired vietnamese leader, Ding, discovered that the roads were all washed out. And the town was lousy with tourists. we managed to get a floor to sleep on, and were promised a hot shower. with that relatively ok news, I started to drink beer with an Irish couple, while most of my fellow travellers napped. that was fun, and we could find some restaurants with a few things other than ramen noodles, which was great. i can't express how wonderful it was to eat vegetables. but word on the street was that the town was running out of supplies. Ding was calling all his contacts to find a route that was open, and we were getting snippets of news throughout the day. Was able to get to the internet and send a few emails, mostly to let my mom know i was alive, since i wasn't sure how much news was getting back to the us about this. Before bed, Ding told us his plan to get to hanoi, which involved doubling the price, and driving for 28 hours, or some such thing. Ugh. I went to sleep, sharing a full sized mattress with 2 other guys about my size. It was such a major step up from the night before, I was happy to have that.
Got up the next morning, and even the 28 hour trip wouldn't get us to Hanoi. Roads everywhere were gone, there was no hope. Just go back to Lao Cai before the town we were in ran out of food and water, which we were told would happen that day. But it was sunny, I could finally kind of dry my soaking smelly clothes and at least I could get a hotel room in Lao Cai, maybe. Of course, Ding still expected to be paid his 1/2 million dong for this crazy little trip and my money was still in a safe in Hanoi. Oi. The ding dong jokes were being made. These Mit students in our van, who seemed to have unlimited access to cell phone minutes had had enough, and eventually shelled out 1200 us dollars to take a helicopter to hanoi. I heard that they left that night. It would have been cool to take a helicopter in vietnam, really cool I think given the history but not 1200 dollars cool.
So I went back to Lao Cai. Nice to be able to use the internet at my leisure and sit and drink a needed beer. Finally got a refund from my initial train ticket which allowed me to pay back Jan for the spending money he had lent me. Also found a western union and started trying to work to get mom to send me $$ through them. Just when I was thinking about a hotel, Ding showed up again and said that one of his contacts had tickets on a sleeper train that would leave that night. Joy! 300,000 dong was borrowed from jan, and we happily drank beer, ate, and waited until 10 pm.
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