Sorry for the Group Email

We got on the return train to Hanoi from Sapa at eight in the evening. This was bad news: the train only takes eight hours, which would put us in Hanoi at four am.

We were in a cabin with a Vietnamese couple. Sharing a carriage with locals is generally a good sign:the people we’d been on trains with in Asia had been borderline obsessive-compulsive about sleeper trains, passing out as soon as the brakes were released and remaining obligingly unconscious until we reached the other end. There’s very little worse than small talk when no-one speaks anyone else’s language.

The first sign of trouble came when Mendy tried to turn off the light. The trains in Vietnam (and China, and Mongolia, and Russia) have small reading lights at the end of each bunk for when the overhead light’s off.

But, as the cabin plunged into darkness, the Vietnamese woman made a panicked sound, like a bird getting its wing chewed by a dog. Mendy, perhaps thinking that she’d inadvertently activated an in-bed electrical torture system, flicked the light back on. The Vietnamese woman – who was using a backlit MP3 player, rather than anything actually requiring light – testily plugged in the desk lamp sitting on the table. The desk lamp would remain on for the rest of the journey.

The next thing I knew, it was 2am, I was wide awake, and the Vietnamese man was sitting on my bed. On an English sleeper train, this would be tsked and eye-rolled at. In Asia, this invasion of personal space is a faux pas on approximately the same level as wearing your underwear on your head, and would ordinarily be greeted with a blazing row and, possibly, fisticuffs.

I tsked and rolled my eyes. The couple were having a fight. I popped my headphones in and fell asleep to Stephen Fry’s deep, settling tones in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. I found out in the morning that Mendy hadn’t slept at all.

The man eventually moved, and we arrived in Hanoi at 4.50am.

(With apologies to Chris Phin. I’m not sure how to get that interpunkt in there.)

You would think, by now, that we’d become experts at the super-early start. We’ve risen, or been delivered to unlikely towns, at four and five am about half a dozen times in the last two months, and it would be nice to think that in that time our bodies have become commando-like units of alertness, ready to heave heavy packs a few miles to our next hotel. Instead, our bodies heave unsteadily down the stairs of the bus or train, and we slump on the first bench we find, slowly formulating an unreliable plan.

We made it as far as the railway waiting room, where Mendy finally fell asleep.

Mendy is a world-class, champion sleeper. The fact that she hadn’t slept on the train astonished me, because I’m normally the one who sits there tsking at anyone who dares make any noise.

Mendy sits there with her eyes closed and her head lolling from side to side like a kind of upside-down pendulum that has given up all concept of timing. Occasionally her head crashes into things – the window, my shoulder, the seat in front – with incredible force. She still doesn’t wake up.

It was that kind of sleep in the waiting room. She can’t possibly have been comfortable, but there was nothing to do but finish off Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and wait.

At 6.30am we decided that Hanoi held more promise than the empty waiting room. We gathered our things, strapped ourselves into our bags and hiked 2km into town. We reached a café and had a lacklustre breakfast with terrible coffee. (Thailand and Laos grow their own coffee, and it tastes superb. I’m not if Vietnam grows its own anywhere, but if ours that morning was an example, it needs to get out of the business.)

What we needed, we decided, was a swim. We made our way another 2km across the grey city, this time without our bags, to the Army Hotel. The Lonely Planet told us that there was a pool there.

The Army Hotel was a rather severe-looking place, where a militarily-uniformed woman informed us that, for the paltry sum of 56,000 Dong each (about £1.50, or $3), we could have towels, a locker, access to the sauna, and a swim.

Now, I’m not sure what counts as the full story to the doubtless dependable and conscientious people at the Lonely Planet, but on that cool, damp morning, we could certainly have done with knowing that the Army’s swimming pool was outside. It took us a full fifteen minutes to get in, eventually only doing so because a brace of Australian children were making us look like wimps.

The rest of the day is a bit of a blur. We went to a supermarket and bought ingredients for sandwiches, which we ate to the amusement of passing Hanoians, who tend not to do picnics.

That night, awake for the better part of 24 hours, we boarded another bus, and headed south.

Dave is just about awake now.