Strange Places

I've written blog posts in some strange places and times. This is one of the stranger:

Welcome to Hanoi railway station at 04:35 am!

We've just got in on the night sleeper from Lao Cai, the station on the Chinese border, and we've got an hour and a half to kill before the cafés open for breakfast. There is a lot of work and investment going on to upgrade Hanoi station with new platforms, passenger bridges, electronic signage and reception halls. Shame it hasn't got to the waiting room yet .... 

The station at the border post at Lao Cai is being completely rebuilt as a modern glass and steel construction, that looks as if it will be completed later this year. The station has a difficult recent history. Lao Cai was the point that 200,000 Chinese troops crossed the border in 1979 to take advantage of Vietnam's eyes being on a campaign 2000km further south in Cambodia to remove Pol Pot (of the killing fields infamy) from power. Lao Cai and a number of towns in the mountain region around were more or less flattened in the 16 days before the Chinese withdrew having suffered heavy casualties - approximately 20,000 never made it back over the border. The Vietnamese Women's militia were reputed to have made a significant contribution to the Chinese casualties and I'll try to write something about my observations on the place of women in Vietnamese society in the future.

Next stop for us in Halong Bay and two days on a boat, unlikely to get much internet access there so might be a while before the next update. Hopefully we'll be looking better by then: