Go Away, Come Again Another Day

"Noah was 600 years old. It was the 17th day of the second month of the year. On that day all of the springs at the bottom of the oceans burst open. God opened the windows of the skies. Rain fell on the earth for 40 days and 40 nights."

Genesis 7, 11-13.

This, of course, is complete bollocks. But what happened to us is only slightly less unbelievable.

We were about 45 minutes away from getting back into Ha Noi city when it began to rain. Very, very hard.

We had to slow down to a pedestrian pace, but other people on the road were still skimming around missing each other by a balding cat's whisker. We actually witnessed the aftermath of a crash between a little car and the back of a lorry that I don't think anyone in the car could have survived. It was rather gruesome and nerve-racking and even served to shut the pleasantly motor-mouthed driver up for a few minutes.

We eventually got back to the outskirts of the city. We were halfway round the roundabout that leads to the bridge into Ha Noi, when we came to a halt.

We waited.

An hour later we had moved about three feet. We were hearing over the radio (translated - between sighs - by our increasingly fed up driver) that the worst storms in 35 years were overhead. Super.

Helen and I thought we were in trouble as we had our flight down to Kuala Lumpur the next day - what we hadn't realised was that Steph, Kyle and the gang had to be at the train station for ten o'clock that evening.

It didn't look as though we were going to move very far at all, and after another half hour's deliberation, interspersed with watching people trying to mount curbs and get stuck in the mud and turf that surrounded the roads, we bailed out of the van, like rats from a dry but sinking ship.

It was still raining. Really, really hard.

We literally waded, sometimes up to our mid-thighs, for about a mile down the road in the direction that we were only half sure was the right way to go. Helen and I were better equipped than the others were, as we had only packed a very small bag to go on the trip. Others had full backpacks on with as much as twenty kilos of swag. We were, conversely, the least prepared clothing-wise.

Whilst Ed and Nicky whacked on their arctic-shitstorm-proof jackets we tried to put our 'other T-shirt' on under a borrowed umbrella.

After about half an hour’s trudging, narrowly missing falling down open drains and breaking our toes on roots from the trees lining the road, Kyle realised that he'd left his 'fucking bastard fucking' camera in the van.

While he sprinted back as best as he could in flips flops and three foot deep water, we made hard work of the next 400 yards or so. The stench from the sewage that was now floating around our special areas started to sting our nasal passages and we stopped and waited for Kyle to get back.

While we were walking the streets had been all but still, people had abandoned their cars and left them at the side of the washed out road. But then large trucks seemed to start to drive past that would wash surfboarding rats up onto the windows of the shops. (Did you know that rats don't have livers, so when they process liquid they just piss, wherever whenever. This is why you shouldn't drink out of cans.) 

Now we were worried that we'd left the van only for it to drive right past us.
We were wetter than a beaver's beaver, but tried to keep upbeat.

Other people were doing the same, and one of the biggest (literally, s/he must have been six foot six) ladyboys in existence offered us a cup of tea and a strange cigarette. Declined with a smile.

Over two hours later we managed to cross the bridge back into the city and found our hotel. And here we are, sodden.


The hotel (which Ed and Nicky had stayed in before the trip and we had left a deposit at for this rainy night) utterly denied that Ed and Nicky had booked a room. 

They then had to run around trying to find a room at ten o'clock at night, which, luckily, they finally did. We planned on meeting up about an hour later, as we had a plethora of things to organise before our flight the next day.

We were hungrier than Roseanne in the episode that she ate Dan.

Running so fast the rain missed us, we went to a place called, ingeniously, 'LE PUB' to get a pizza. 45 minutes later, still pizza-less, we decided we would take it back to the hotel to eat. When it finally came out, we dashed back to the hotel to find that we had been locked out and the young lad who was looking after reception had already made his bed in front of the door.

We had to wake him up, and he begrudgingly let us in. Speeding up to our room to eat our soggy plates of cheese and flour, we realised what time it was.

We weren't entirely sure where the other guys were and it was getting late. The final nail in the coffin was that we would have to wake the poor lad up again if we were to meet up with them, and then again when we came back in.

We'd survived another big old storm, but, unfortunately, that was the sad end to our travels with Edward and Nicola. (Now safely back in Sunny Sunny London!)