Good morning Vietnam!!

It took about 2 days of travel to get from Hong Kong to Vietnam. We took a local train from central Hong Kong to the 'frontier' with mainland China and walked back across the border into un-civilisation. (When I first heard that you can walk across the border between China and HK, I pictured something like open plains with barbed wire and signs saying 'No mans land'. As it turns out, it's much less interesting than that - more like passing the security area at an airport - right up to getting your passport stamped.) We knew we were back in China again when we heard that familiar hoicking sound :-)

From the border we took another train to Guangzhou then an overnight sleeper to Nanning arriving in at around 4am. There's not much to do at 4am in many places and there's even less when you're in the middle of China, so you can imagine our surprise when we stumbled onto a 24-hour internet cafe right next to the station (with a surprisingly fast connection too!)

The quality of the trains we travelled on was inversly proportional to our distance from HK until by the time we left Nanning destined for the Vietnamese border, we were piled into the worst train we have been on yet (and we've been on a LOT of trains). It was like a scene out of Oliver Twist, with people crammed onto uncomfortable wooden seats in stiffling heat. It took us over 4 hours to go about 80 miles! Even at EUR 1.70, it was bad value for money!

The train didn't actually go to the Vietnamese border - but instead, dropped us about 10km away. Of course, where there are tourists, there are opportunists and we made this trip on the back of a 3-wheeled motorbike :-)

Unlike the China/HK border, the China/Vietnam border actually IS like I described above! There's about a 1km stretch that you have to walk along between the two borders, each with little huts where people can eye you suspiciously and then grudgingly stamp your passport. I really enjoyed the experience :-) We would later learn that our 1-month visa we got for our planned 10 day visit would not be long enough!

We finally arrived in Hanoi later that night and enjoyed a well deserved rest.