We are leaving Hanoi this evening on the open (sleeper) bus to Hue in central Vietnam. The open bus ticket covers the journey from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh city and allows us to break the journey in Hue, Hoi An, Nha Trang and Darlat all for £29 each – an absolute bargain. The first leg to Hue is an overnight journey on a sleeper bus leaving a 6pm and arriving at 8am tomorrow. We aren’t quite sure what to expect, but comfort isn’t high on the list. Unfortunately, though, because we’ve spent far longer in Hanoi than we planned we’re not going to have quite the leisurely journey down to Ho Chi Minh City that we originally envisaged. So we’ve decided not to stop in the seaside resort of Nha Trang and will probably double-back and go to Darlat after HCMC. We spend the morning packing up our stuff and after pursuing the insurance claim, which American Express Travel Insurance have verbally agreed to cover to the tune of $1500, we spend a couple of hours exploring Hanoi beyond the Old Quarter.
We have come to the conclusion that we have brought far too much stuff on this trip; our bags are bursting and are ridiculously heavy. We’ve managed to pare things down slightly so that we are only carrying four items of luggage rather than the six we had at one point. But we intend to do some serious culling when we get to HCMC and send some of the non-essentials back to the UK. According to Andy that will mainly be my clothes.
A visit to the Post Office this afternoon took care of faxing all the remaining medical documents to Amex. I’ve been dealing with Axa Assistance in Sydney who provide the assistance line for south-east Asia. They have been very helpful, if a tad slow in responding. They confirmed today that they would contact the hospital to guarantee the costs which would have been great had we not had to settle the bill the day before so that Andy could be discharged! So we will have to go through the claims process with the Amex London office. How straightforward that will be remains to be seen.
This afternoon we took a stroll down Dien Bien Phu street which run from just west of the Old Quarter to West Lake in the north -west. It is a large tree-lined boulevard which is home to some rather grand colonial buildings, some private residences and others housing government offices. Here on the uneven payments there are badminton courts marked out and people set up nets and play as the traffic streams by!