Walking to Vietnam - and yet more travel troubles

  Pingxiang, China
Friday, August 1, 2008

So, the "bus to Hanoi" was of course not exactly that.  We had to take a bus from Guilin to Nanning in the center of Guangxi province.  From there, we would take a bus to Pingxiang, near the border.  From Pingxiang, you can catch a cab to "Friendship Pass".  When the cab drops you off, you walk 600 metres to the border to go through Chinese and Vietnamese customs.  After surviving that, you cab to the nearest Vietnamese town, Lang Son, 25 kms away.  It's possible then to take a bus or train to Hanoi.

I actually was well aware of all that.  The Brits we met on the way sadly were not.  Some 'tour guide' in Guilin sold our new friends Josephine and Lee a ticket "straight to Hanoi" (did I mention that everyone in Guilin is out to cheat the tourists as much as possible, most especially the cabbies?).  They were waiting for the bus with us at 10pm, and the guy leading us to the bus was glad we - well, really I - could translate for the two British backpackers. 

I'd thought that my real Chinese practice had ended after the hour or so I spent chatting with a family from Guangzhou before we left for our bus, but I was wrong.  I quickly got to practice all the arguing and cursing I knew.  The bus 'company' guy first lead us a few blocks from the train station to the side of some road. (I should mention here that Jen and I bought tickets from CITS, who are SUPPOSED to be legit.)  When the bus finally pulled over to pick us up - 30 minutes late - it was full.  I don't mean every seat gone full.  I mean people sitting in the aisle all the way to the front of the bus full.  We didn't have much choice but to take the bus, but I started yelling at the couple workers and driver about the situation.  The tickets were not at all cheap, and the first leg of the trip was supposed to be four hours.  We stood in the aisle for a while, me cursing in Chinese and English and Jo cursing as only a Londoner can, until the bus pulled over at a rest stop.  They had us take the seats of people that had gotten up.  I protested, but they told us they were our seats since we had ordered them and paid so much.  Damn straight, but that doesn't fix the situation. 

The trip to Nanning took nearly 8 hours, not 4 and I won't get into how miserable it was.  The bus from there to Pingxiang in the morning wasn't much better.  We grabbed lunch in town and then negotiated a cab to the border in the pouring rain.  We walked to Vietnam in the rain and eventually made it through customs smoothly.  I say smoothly because it was without incident, not because dealing with redundant paperwork, small bribes (you pass the health inspection for about $.30), a culture that doesn't believe in lines and an office sweltering at about 100 degrees Fahrenheit was easy.  

20 hours into the trip, some greasy white people

But then, we walked out into Vietnam.  The drawling dialect of our Guangxi drivers was replaced by the staccato tones of the North Vietnamese.  We got ripped off on a cab to Lang Son, but at only $2.50 each (little more than 1 pound each for the brits) it wasn't worth the effort to argue.  The arguing came in Lang Son.  The driver took us to a backyard where a minibus was parked.  We insisted on being taken to the real bus, but he lied and said there was none.  He also lied to tell us the train had left.  Since none of us spoke Vietnamese nor had any idea where we our the bus/train stations were, we went with it.  Negotiating a price for the minibus - which simultaneously included some currency exchange - was much worse.  They bargained hard to screw us on the price and on the exchange.  When we finally got somewhere we could live with (the price where you know you're getting screwed but the extra couple dollars in your money just aren't worth the effort anymore), the guy repeatedly handed us wrong change to try to cheat us.  He'd laugh when we caught him.  The powers of simple arithmetic...

After fleecing us, the minibus drove around town trying to fill up with people for Hanoi.  Why be content with probably a week's wage at once?  The drive was great though, and honestly I was just happy to be in the air conditioned van rather than waiting for a bus somewhere.  The taxi and van combined were also still slightly cheaper than the bus from the border a Chinese had tried to arrange for us.  The North Vietnamese countryside was beautiful.  It was more limestone mountains and rice paddies but somehow very different from China.  Poor Asian villages still looked like poor Asian villages, but the colonial-inspired architecture that sprung up here and there made it more interesting than China.  The rural traffic was much more relaxed than China too with none of the diversity of smoke spewing buckets of bolts like the Chinese countryside.