Nanning Hotels
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Standing Room Only
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At Wuhan station the only 'seats' available are standing and are not particularly keen to get them as we are on the train for nearly 24 hours and my knee still hurts. Decide to go for it and try and upgrade on board (although the ticket office tells us this is not possible so is a bit of a gamble). Get on train and go to conductors office (dining car!) to try and upgrade to soft (4 berth) or hard sleeper (6 berth) at this point we are knackered but are determined not to be ripped off. Both are available (yipee!) but at quite a steep price (20 quid extra each for soft and 10 for hard) we don't have a lot of cash so we then try a game of Chinese poker with the conductor to see if he will back down. This takes a while and he actually seems a nice guy and talks to us in English. He eventually lets us have a hard sleeper for just under 10 quid each and we get taken to our 'cabin' (there are no doors in hard sleeper) which we are the only ones in as everyone else got off the train in Wuhan so there are dirty sheets and there are no clean ones (I know this is petty but trivial things have great importance when you are knackered!). Am glad I have a sleeping bag liner though!
Later that day whilst reading our China book a chinese guy tries to read it over our shoulder and we invite him to sit with us and have a chat using our collective Mandarin/English (approx 20 words) plus using the vocab at the back of our guide book. He is a sweet guy who has 2 kids (contrary to the one kid rule) and is a construction worker. He is fascinated by the English money we show him and we give him 20p, show him our passports, etc. He wanders off for a bit and brings back a beer for us! A woman joins in and gives us some walnuts. They refuse to have any of our food. It is times like this that you really feel like you are experiencing a country and the people here are unbelievable. I wish that we were a bit more like this!
Sleep well and arrive in Nanning at about 6am. We hope that the ticket office is open (the guide book says its shut till 9) as we want to get the 7.30 train to Pingxiang at the China/Vietnamese border. Fortunately its open and we get a whole seat each (!) on board for the 3 hour journey accompanied by mainly local women with their kids who ply us with yet more food. Karst scenery amazing (lots of limestone pinnacles). On arrival at Pingxiang get a rickshaw to the border about 10k away and through Friendship gate when we are then allowed to leave China then walk about 5 mins to get to the Vietnamese side fill in more forms and are let in (got our visas in London before we left). Am disappointed that it is not automatically hot when we arrive in Vietnam! Then spend a while haggling with a taxi to get taken to Lan Son to get the bus to Hanoi (yes we were confused too) taken to the 'bus station' which was a car park outside a petrol station and was no way the bus station. Guy on the minibus tries to completely overcharge us for the trip to Hanoi (takes about 3 hours and is sposed to be about 3/4 dollars). End up paying about 5 each (despite him starting about 5 times more than this and claiming that petrol prices has gone up). Are then taken around town to pick up various people and their random luggage. In a 14 seater minibus they manage to squeeze in about 20 people plus all the bags. It is only when Dave refuses for us to have anymore people squeezed in next to us that they stop and we go to Hanoi. Trip is beautiful past huge paddy fields with hundreds of workers doing something or other to the rice! Is somewhat spoilt by a kid being sick next to me and a woman being sick behind Dave (thought would share that with you). We decide after the last few days we are definitely staying in a posh place tonight!
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