We’re still in Hanoi. There I want to finally finish the story about ‘that knife’ I tried to get from Laos to Vietnam, as it did end there in Hanoi.
For those who have read previous Juanito’s Travels posts you may recall that I bought a knife at the Mekong Elephant Centre with the hope of taking it back to Australia.
It was a beautifully rustic, hand-made knife that a nice Laotian man had made from recycled scrap metal there in his little open air workshop at the Mekong Elephant Centre on the Mekong River just next to the little town of Pakbeng (or Pak Beng) which is a kind of stopover town on the Mekong River between Huay Xai, on the Thai/ Laos border, and Luang Prabang.
I thought I could use that knife in the garden to cut branches and the like (it was a pretty decent-sized knife) when I got back to Australia and it’d be all good. And easy. And it was. Initially. I carried that knife down the Mekong on that slow, and very uncomfortable, boat down the Mekong, in the scorching April heat, to Luang Prabang where we chilled out on dry land for a few days.
The trouble with the knife only came on the next leg of the journey from Luang Prabang to Vientiane where we were taking the very fast new, Chinese-built, train. It was a beautiful, very efficient, train that was only going to take us like 2 hours rather than like 18 hours on the road. I don’t recall if it actually took 2 hours but it was pretty darn quick, less than 3 hours I think, maybe it slowed down a bit in spots. Very nice trip, read past blogs for more on that.
The fast train is super nice. And super fast. But, you can’t bring any sharp items, like knives, on it. There is also no way you can pack the knives and put them in storage as you have to take your bags with you into the carriage and you have to go through a metal detector and everything. There is no separate luggage area like on a plane. So, in short, no knives allowed. At all. Zero knives. Zero.
You’ll have to read my previous posts for more details on how I tried to get around that but the short summary is, after many creative attempts to try and get those knives back to Australia via post and what have you, my very helpful hotel reception guy in Luang Prabang convinced me that we could give the knives to his bus driver friend who could drive them to Hanoi on his regular service there where we could then pick them up from Hanoi bus station.
I say knives, plural, for I also had a little Swiss army knife given to me by a married Swiss woman named Corinne who I had been travelling up the east coast of Australia back in the early 1990s (read a fictitious version of that trip here). It was a knife, by the way, that I had been previously allowed to have on my person when I travelled on a Thai airways flight from Australia to Thailand and then onto London in 1995. Boy have times have changed. They won’t let you on with a knitting needle nowadays.
So the knives went one way on the bus towards Hanoi, and my wife and I went another way, on the very cool fast train to Vientiane and then by plane to Hanoi.
As I wrote, we were to collect the knives at a bus station in Hanoi. Sounded like a reasonably easy plan to execute. I’d been keeping in regular contact with my hotel reception guy from Luang Prabang via Whatsapp and he informed me that the knives would be arriving at the bus station in Hanoi one evening when we were there. I was like, good, I will try and go and collect them, and we arranged a time and he gave me the address and all that. It was all going to be rather simple, walk in, meet the bus driver, collect the knives and then head back to the hotel.
So my wife and I head out to the bus station to collect the knives.
Well, as you may now be imagining, it wasn’t that simple. Firstly our Grab couldn’t take us all the way to the bus station as it was a national holiday for Reunification Day and so half of Hanoi was heading to the bus station to get on a bus to go on holidays for a few days. So, we couldn’t get all the way to the bus station and we had to stop a few blocks from there and make our way through all the millions of scooters and cars and the like – it really seems virtually no one in Hanoi walks anywhere and they only ever go anywhere more than 10 metres on their scooter. They seem to have been practically born with two wheels beneath them.
We managed to eventually get to the bus station at the time our bus driver was meant to be arriving from Luang Prabang. I messaged the hotel guy in Luang Prabang saying we were there and he messaged back saying the bus had been delayed but that it should be there in the next hour. So we decided to wait around a bit.
The station was absolutely chaotic. There were millions of people going everywhere trying to get onto buses in some system most of us foreigners could not possibly hope to understand, though I did see at least one foreigner who had managed to work it out as she sat on one of these sleeper buses which had rows of mattresses lining the windows with a satisfied smile on her face as she overlooked the chaos below. I can only applaud her for working out whatever system was going on there, she probably had a PhD in Chaos Theory to help her manage.
I think we were there for maybe an hour, walking from place to place, squeezed in amongst this sea of humanity, getting accosted by people trying to sell us stuff, getting told we need to go one place then another, but not understanding any of the directions, or signs or anything about the place really. It was just generally a very, very stressful place to be.
My wife was certainly not coping with the crowd. But, apparently the bus was coming into the station in a minute, and it was some number bus, which I can’t recall, and we spent a bit more time trying to work out the bus number system on the hundreds of buses parked in this big car park thing, trying to not get run over by incoming and outgoing buses, and what the hell any of it meant before.
After a while I could really see my wife wasn’t coping with this, I suggested after trying to make some sense of things, ‘hey let’s just get out of the station and work out our next move, you’re obviously not coping’. I was barely keeping it together myself but I was a bit more used to it, I’d seen such systems in India when I was there in 1995.
So we decided to make our way out after perhaps an hour, or even an hour and half maybe, in the utter madness of the Hanoi bus station on a national holiday. And I said, ‘hey let’s just ditch these bloody knives, I can see you’re not coping’. My wife, somewhat shell shocked, just kind of nodded her head.
‘Let’s go across the road to that cafe (pointing to a cafe across the street), sit down, have a drink and then order a Grab back to the hotel’. And after that my mind went a bit blank, I’m not sure whether we got our Grab or just grabbed a taxi, but somehow, not too much later, we were in a car heading back to the hotel.
I know our phone batteries were practically kaput by that stage so maybe we had to get a taxi, who knows. All I can say is we never want to go back to that bloody bus station there in Hanoi ever again. Though, perhaps it was just extra crazy due to the Reunification Day holiday. Don’t know, and I’m not going to find out. Anway, despite calling this blog the 50 Year Backpacker, It’s fancy trains and planes for us!
But, keep in mind the fact that there is Reunification Day holiday at the end of April as this, as we would soon see, had an impact on our next destination, the usually tranquil touristy town of Hoi An.
I messaged Luang Prabang on the way back from the bus station and said we’d given up on the knives. He tried to convince us it was still a possibility, but I was like, hey, we’re staying at this hotel for one more night. If the guy can get the knives sent there then fine, otherwise the knives are gone and I never want to hear about them again, tell the bus driver he can have them!
And we never heard from those knives again (to date). The Laos knife wasn’t a big deal, as I’d only got it a few days early (though it was pretty expensive for a Laotian knife!) but I still had an attachment to the Swiss army knife that Swiss Corinne gave me.
Perhaps it was a sign though that, after all those years, I needed to lose my attachment to that knife and that part of my life. Since that time back in the early 90s I had travelled to Ireland, the UK, France and India. Had two kids, raised them in Canberra, Australia. Got married. Traveled to Ireland, India, France a few times, Japan, Iceland, Italy a couple of times, Thailand a couple of times, Germany, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Cuba, Singapore, Austria, around Australia (where we live at present), Greece, Türkiye, the USA a few times, and Mexico many times. Got divorced. Lost a testicle. Had the kids grow up. Moved to the Gold Coast. Gotten married again, to a Mexican, the lovely, beautiful one who was there now, poor thing, getting overwhelmed by the effort to retrieve some knives from the absolute madness of the Hanoi bus station.
And now my wife and I were travelling around the world.
We didn’t need those knives hanging around. Those memories, those ghosts.
They were gone.
Move on from those attachments, the Budhha would say, they will only bring misery.
They were just things. The most important thing was we were there together, my wife and I. Nothing else mattered.
I think we had one more night, or maybe two, in Hanoi, and then, very early in the morning we packed our things again and headed to Hanoi airport for our flight to Da Nang and then onto Hoi An.
