HK-Guangzhou-Nanning-Hanoi

Greetings from Hanoi, Vietnam. Between the train and buses, we've so far covered a total of about 1500 km. I think that's only a fraction of what's ahead of us.

So far it's been a very pleasant and relaxing journey. I managed to pick Shima up from the Guangzhou airport without much hassle, and he played a few tunes at the Reflector show at 191space. Surprisingly, there were actually kids who'd come out to see him. We had a late night post-show supper with Dai Wah Mui and some HK friends - a ridiculous amount of food for a mere 30 yuan per head.

The following day was spent lounging around the guest house until check-out time, since it was pouring quite heavily in Guangzhou. Our train for Nanning wasn't scheduled to depart until 16:57, so we just took our sweet time, and swung by an electronics/computer area to pick up a cheapo mp3 player (RMB100 for 1 gb) and some memory cards.

We had a 4-berth compartment to ourselves, which made for a more private and relaxing experience. The slightly cheaper class (6-berth) was more of a military dorm style, ie compartments without doors, hence a real lack of privacy. I'm sure it was still a lot more comfortable than those travelling in the seats. Since this was a sleeper train, night had set in by the time we left the industrial parts of Guangdong province, and hence there wasn't much of a view of the countryside.

We pulled in to a pitch black Nanning at a little after 6 am. Thanks to China having a single time zone across the entire width of the country, we were technically in the 5 am time zone, hence no sunrise at 6 am. We had no difficulty locating the street where the shop that supposedly sold the Nanning to Hanoi bus tickets was located on, but we learned from a nearby guest house owner that it had moved. Not being familiar with Nanning, we decided it'd be best to just catch a 20 minute taxi ride over to the bus station itself and just gamble on the possibility of there still being tickets available.

My journey through Guangzhou and Nanning has shattered a lot of my pre-conceptions about the state of Chinese cities. I'd imagined them in my mind to still be rather backwards and undeveloped. When I see how green Guangzhou is, or how clean and spread out the skyscrapers are being erected over in Nanning, I can't help but feel a sense of sadness and despair for Hong Kong. If things continue the way they are, ie with apparent lack of interest in tackling pollution issues, as well as an unquenching thirst to build as tall and as many buildings in as little space as possible, we may really lag behind the other Chinese cities in a decade or two.

We had a couple of hours to kill at the Lang Dong Bus Station before our Hanoi bus was going to depart, so we checked out the local KFC, primarily to sit down and grab a cup of coffee. Imagine our surprise when we saw their breakfast menu - congee and fried dough sticks, egg and ham breakfast burrito! Ironically enough, chicken could not be found in any of the dishes.

Rural farming landscapes served as the backdrop for the vast bulk of our journey from Nanning to Hanoi. The only real excitement came about at Friendship Pass, the Chinese-Vietnamese border crossing, when some Chinese immigration officers made a stink about me entering/leaving China on a re-entry permit, but using a British passport to travel elsewhere. There was no logic to it since I've done the same thing with Macau. And why did they care how I was going to enter Vietnam? As far as I was concerned, I'd entered and was going to leave China on a legitimate piece of travel document.

I must admit I was pretty nervous though. The thought of being denied departure, and hence screwing up the entire trip, was the last thing I needed. I was also worried that the Hanoi bus couldn't wait whilst I was being held up. Luckily everything got cleared up, they had nothing to bitch and whine about, and by 12:30 local time we were sitting on the Hanoi bus on the Vietnamese side of the border. Vietnamese immigration was a lot more laid-back, but I guess they made up for this by being rather thorough and having multiple posts along a 100 metre stretch for doing the same thing, ie passports got checked multiple times. What made no sense though was paying 2,000 dong for a so-called 'medical check-up', which involved little more than being scanned by one of those body heat machines.

We arrived in Hanoi a little before 5 in the afternoon. The sight from our bus of literally hundreds of motorcyclists was pretty intense. Of course, this was all rather mild compared to the experience of actually walking on the streets and trying to cross through these sea of motorcycles without the aid of traffic lights or signs. And with the sidewalks being filled up by shop vendors spilling their wares out on the street, we've had no choice BUT to squeeze ourselves onto the edge of the busy streets.

In typical unsuspecting tourist fashion, we got screwed over almost as soon as we'd arrived in Hanoi. We successfully thwarted off the scam of getting a super cheap ride into our section of town, ie Old Quarters, at the expense of staying at a hotel/guesthouse of scammer's choice... but just as we were patting ourselves on our backs, we jumped into a taxi rigged with a hyperactive meter. I'd assumed that as soon as a taxi ran by the meter we'd be alright. But obviously not. This meter was going up at an alarming rate. I started to inquire about the rate per kilometre, and pointed out that it was quite a lot more than what was mentioned in my Lonely Planet. Granted I had a 2005 edition on me, so I thought that perhaps inflation had hit Hanoi big time and that this was now the norm. Still, I had my suspicions, especially since the distance we'd covered was definitely not the 15 or so kilometres which he claimed. By the time I wanted to get out of the taxi, we were entering the Old Quarters and I was tired of making a scene. We paid our whopping 220,000 D and Trigger's recent edition of LP confirmed that we had indeed jumped on one of the more ridiculously expensive cabs. Based on my experiences in Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Guangzhou... and now Vietnam... taxi drivers are really the scum of the earth. Which blows because I know there are good and honest ones out there too. The bad eggs just kinda make it hard for me to take the good ones seriously.

We checked in to a four person family suite at the Viet Anh II Hotel. At US$35/night, it's money well spent, since we were all pretty tired from the buses and train... plus the room's pretty darn huge and there's free buffet breakfast thrown in, so we can't really complain. We just took it easy on our first night, walking around the Old Quarters and soaking in the atmosphere. The motorcyles were a visual/aural delight for the first couple of hours. Now I find them to be extremely irritating (the way they have to honk at everything that moves), and occasionally life threatening - Trigger got hit on the arm by one and we saw a girl on a bike almost get knocked off by another.

We also managed to book our onward journey to Hué. It was a tough decision to make, choosing between train or bus, but in the end we decided that the bus, at half the price, fit in more nicely with our economical way of traveling. The man working behind the desk at the travel agency, upon learning that we were from Hong Kong, started speaking to us in rusty Cantonese and pulled out his wallet to reveal an identity card of some sort. Turns out that he was a boat refugee and had lived at the Vietnamese refugee camps in Hong Kong for 8 years. It was cool to actually meet someone who'd lived through the experience, to be able to connect to that piece of HK history.