My First Tears

Alright sorry again that it has been so long. Believe me we have been getting emails from parents, friends, etc. making sure we are still alive and we are. So here it goes with my first tears of the trip.

Our last post was right before we headed to the overnight train to Hue. As many of you know I haven’t had the best experiences on trains so I was already nervous about this, but I was prepared to just put everything behind me, take some benadryl and pass out.

The first slight drama happened when we got in a taxi from our hotel headed to the train. We left our hotel around 10:10 which we thought was plenty of time to make it to the train station about 5 minutes from our hotel. So we got in the cab and the driver told us it was going to cost $5 even though he had a meter in his car. We had read and heard from some people we had met that if they don’t turn on the meter than you’re being ripped off so Will immediately demanded that the meter be turned on. After arguing with this guy who was trying to tell us that his engine light was the meter we threatened to get out of the car, and when he heard that he said alright and turned the meter on. At this point they guy seemed pissed off that we made him do it and of course Will commented “I’m finally learning how to deal with these people”. Which was probably the statement that jinxed us because the guy pulled up to a train station but we could tell that it wasn’t the right one. When we told him this was the wrong place he pretended like he had no idea what we were talking about and started taking our bags out of his car. So we got out and were immediately swarmed by all of these guys wanting us to ride on their motos with them to the right train station. And this is when I got a little angry. I headed back out to the main road to find a cab while all of these guys were fallowing us, trying to tell us that we wouldn’t be able to find a cab. We found one luckily and the guy was so nice he drove us to the station immediately and then when Will tried to tip him he was confused and was trying to find him change. The first honest taxi/moto/cyclo driver we had met.

We entered the train station and this is when the real drama began. A few days earlier Will and I had gone to the train station to buy our tickets because we had read that you get the best deal at the train station. When we were there it was a complete madhouse to buy tickets. People cutting in line and poor Will was just swarmed around all of these people. He eventually was able to make it to the front and we were so relieved to have our tickets. When we arrived at the train station we showed our tickets to this kind of creepy little guy who was supposed to escort you to your cabin. He took us on to one of the coaches and Will and I immediately looked around and we were the ONLY white people around. He took us to our cabin and to our surprise there were 6 beds which were pretty much made out of an inch pad. Will started to get flustered and explained to this guy that this was not where we were supposed to be sitting; that we actually have soft-sleeper tickets. When Will walked off this guy lost it. He started screaming at Will to come back and go in our cabin. Will refused and tried to get off the train because we were positive we were in the wrong place. Well after about 10 minutes of arguing with this guy and going to the main booking office we realized that we had booked the wrong tickets and we couldn’t upgrade because the train was completely full. This is when the tears came. We were headed back onto the same coach, where we had already made a huge scene, and we put back in our cabin. Then this creepy man started holding his hand out for his tip and when we gave him all we had he pointed to Will’s pockets, then my purse, and then he started looking at our bags like he was going to try and open them. I kind of freaked. He finally left and I just laid down on what was supposed to be my bed for the night, closed my eyes and shed some tears. I looked over at poor Will who I could tell felt horrible so I did what I could to suck it up. We ended up watching a 24 and then taking some benadryl and falling asleep. I ended up sleeping till about 8:30 which was GREAT because we got in at 10:00 so I was fine and it all ended up fine. We had our first major drama/fight and got over it. All I can say is thanks to benadryl and Will’s laptop for getting me through that crisis.