Scammed on the bus to Hanoi

Having just made it to the boarder in the tuk-tuk, we walked through friendship gate, from china into Vietnam and got through all the boarder formalities with relative ease. The only issue we had was the westerner's medical check that we had to pay for!!! We thought that is was quite strange that every time a westerner went past one of the check booths a slip of paper would appear and then rapidly disappear again for any locals. When we got there we were slightly concerned that we were being told that we had to pay for a medical check. The cost for this check was 2000 dong and the check consisted of a video camera being pointed at us (doubt very mcuh it was even turned on) and the officials watching us retrieving the cash from our wallets. I was not to happy about paying this littel fee, which was blatent corruption, but when you are paying what is the equivalent of about 7 pence to get out of a very hot building, so be it.Our next little bit of fun was trying to explain to the taxi driver where we wanted to go and that we were not going to be ripped off for the trip. We eventually agreed on a price to take us to the nearest town to catch what we thought was a train. Half way there he was muttering something about there not being any trains for a few hours and that it was quicker for us to get a bus. He then proceeded to pull into a petrol station where convinently there was a minibus, with a sign in the window saying Hanoi. We should have seen this little scam coming a long way off, but we were all being a little slow off the mark and before we knew it the taxi was gone and we were left negotiating with the man on the bus for the cost of the trip to Hanoi. I use that term very loosly...it was more them teling us the price, us offering another price, them not budging on their original price and us paying them half of the money (which was all we had on us) and we climb into the mini bus.At this point all seemed to be going OK....however, things soon began to change. We were told to sit across the four seats at the back of the bus and that we could put our feet on the items that were on the floor. I did think that this was a little strange, but hey, perhaps we were picking up a few more people. The minibus then proceeded to drive all around Lang Son, basically picking up local people and their vast amounts of market goods, until the bus was full. After about an hour, the bus was full and we thought we would now be on our way to Hanoi, especially as we had seen almost all the streets in Lang Son twice. But no, we drove arouns for about another hour, picking up more people and more vast quantites of market goods. Finally, once we had about 22 people in a 16 seat minibus, aswell as about a ton of market goods, we finally set off for Hanoi, cramped on the back seat. By this point I was in a considerable amount of knee and arse pain (which I found out three hours later was due to the fact that there was a sack of potatos rammed under my seat. By this point it had also become very obvious that we we were paying for everyone else's journey. On the way to Hanoi it was quite amusing to see other simialr minibuses, rammed full with locals and market goods with four westerners rammed into the back seat. I think it really sunk it that we had been properly had, when I went to the cash point to withdraw the other half of the cash that we owed for the trip. I handed over the cash in the bus and it was then passed around to all the kids in the bus, so that they could see what crisp 100,000 dong notes looked like!!!!Still the bus got us to within a street of where we wanted to be in the Old Quarter in Hanoi and although we obviously got 'taken for ride' the trip whole trip only actually cost us about 5 pounds each. In some ways could could say that we got value for money. We had a five hour trip instead of a three hour trip and we now know our way around Lang Son like the back of our hands...and the scenery was pretty incredible as well!!!