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Published: October 16th 2009
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We took the winding road down from Sapa to Lao Cai, enjoying the splendid views on the way. Lao Cai is just a border town, and we got taken straight to the immigration building. First we exited Vietnam, with my now regular panic that someone will stamp a blank page of my passport and I won't have room for the visas I need soon...the passport is almost full, and I need it to get home! We then walked across no mans land towards Hekou in China. Already I had a chance to practice my Chinese with the man crossing at the same time.
At Chinese Immigration I had another small panic when they read my temperature as too high...I blame the technology! Thankfully they used some other, equally unreliable temperature recorder and let me pass! Hoorah, we made it into China!
Once we crossed into Hekou, we were bemused at the fact that no one seemed to care that we were there! No one hassled us for a tuk tuk, or a taxi, or a bus, it was quite a relief from the usual! What was more strange was that there was nowhere around for us to change our money into Chinese Yuan. It took a taxi ride (thankfully a nice man at a bank paid for it!) and a few pointers in the right direction before we found somewhere. (Vietnamese Dong is useless outside of Vietnam, so we changed our Dong into US dollars, and then changed the US dollars in Hekou). Hekou was a strange place - not a lot to see, so we were thankful we only had to wait a few hours for an overnight bus to Kunming in Yunan province. I took a walk around and saw a few familiar signs of China, ie the children's bums hanging out of their trousers, and people spitting...oh how I'd missed that sound! We had a good bowl of spicy noodles, and luckily a clock nearby chimed because despite having only walked 100 metres, we had crossed a time zone - we would have missed our bus had we not realised!
(We had tried to get a bus to Yuanyang rice terraces, but they only leave in the mornings).
The night bus was interesting, as we stopped a lot, usually in the middle of nowhere! The first stop was very official though, as the police got on board and demanded everyone's ID. There was a lot of shouting and loud voices. I couldn't tell if they were shouting, or that was just normal! There was some discrepancy going on though with a lot of noise and a few angry men. It ended up with some kind of collection going round the bus for a bit of extra yuan. Ben and I clearly had no idea what was going on so they didn't demand anything from us. Once all that was over, we actually got on the road and there was a lot less shouting and a lot more sleeping!
We arrived in Kunming in the dark, and I was mid-sleep. Not really aware of what was going on, Ben informed me it was our stop, and I had to get off the bus - luckily just in time, and he'd grabbed the bags!
Again, it seemed that no one cared we were in Kunming, there was no obvious way of getting into the centre of town and the people I asked in the station didn't seem to know much either! Instead we followed our trusty guide book and searched outside on the main roads for a bus 64. Luckily we saw one drive by, our eyes following it, and we waited at the same bus stop for the next one. Next mission was finding the hostel which happened to be hidden down a quiet street of course! It was worth the trek, as it turned out to be a nice place to stay and explore Kunming from.
J x
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