From China to Vietnam

After all the fun we had in Yunnan province we felt a bit sad to leave China but we knew it was time to move on and head south. For one thing, the weather in Yunnan started to get a bit chilly and we thought that the beaches of Vietnam sounded quite tempting.

To get to Vietnam we took a 10-hour bus ride from Kunming to the border. At the border we had to leave the bus and cross the border on foot. This wasn't quite as easy as it sounds; our bus dropped us off at the bus station in the border town of Hekou in the darkness and nobody could speak enough English to tell us which way the border was. In the end I took my passport out and they seemed to get the idea. We walked in the direction we were sent and came to a barrier. Over the barrier we could see a road leading to Vietnam but short of jumping the barrier we could see no way in. Finally a friendly (no irony here) Chinese border guard came to our assistance and directed us to a small dark alley where the entrance to the chinese customs was found

The procedure on the Chinese side was pretty straightforward; the borderguard took our passports and asked why we didn't have Vietnamese visas, I opened the page of my passport where the visa was and she was happy, then she studied my passport for a while and asked me where I'm from, I told her Finland and she pretended to know that it's a country. Then we were off to get our passports stamped and stared at at another desk and motioned to go to Vietnam. As we had no idea which exit to take we asked another border guard where Vietnam is, she looked at us a bit funny and said 'you go over the bridge'.

We managed our way across the bridge and reached Lao Cai, the Vietnamese side of the border. There three different people stared and stamped our passports without a word, then pointed at a piece of paper we were supposed to fill in with no pens, reluctantly gave us one pen to share and finally stamped the piece of paper and made a point of not welcoming us to Vietnam

As we left the building there were a number of shifty looking 'taxi drivers' offering to take us to places we didn't know. After a bit of bartering we took one of them up on his offer to drive us to Sapa, a little town in the mountains about an hour's drive away from Lao Cai. We probably paid far more then was the going rate for this journey but we got to Sapa just in time for dinner and booked ourselves into a fairly nice hotel



Sapa is quite an interesting place after China. The town has a very European style of architecture and they sell lovely hard crusted rolls (both thanks to the French colonialists, I guess). After the tranquility of the mountain towns of China, Sapa is a bit hectic, everyone and their grandmother is trying to sell you stuff. In fact, they are selling such random stuff that their most common sales pitch is 'you, buy something'.



Sapa is a beautiful place though, and if you can ignore the hawkers and the millions of mopeds it is a nice place to spend a couple of days. We have done a couple of half-day walks in the area and the scenery is pretty wonderful. Last night we also splashed out and spent 30 euros on a meal and a bottle of red wine (the first time we had any wine since Finland!), which was a nice change from local food and weak lager



Tonight we are going to catch our first Vietnamese night train to Hanoi. We are travelling in relative luxury compared to Chinese trains since we are in a compartment of only four people. What that is like in reality remains to be seen...