Thursday 2nd July 2009 bus to china

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Thursday 2nd July 2009 bus to china
We had settled the bill for the hotel after getting over them trying to overcharge us again, honestly, you’d go broke in this city if you didn’t watch yourself. So we were out the door of the hotel at about 6.40am and on the back of some mopeds with our big bags trying to pull us off the backs. The bus left Hanoi at 7.20 and was half empty and pretty comfortable so got another about hour or two of dozing time after which felt way better. The Chinese boarder was only about 3 hour drive away so up we pulled to see if they would accept us into China with the visas that I was still pretty suspicious of, we didn’t fill out any forms for gods sake. First off was trying to get out of ·Vietnam though and the most disorganized passport control and stamping place ever. Everyone just crowded in front of this desk with about a hundred other s jostling to get our passports in. Then when they took them I watched our passports being sent amongst the 3 workers about 10 times without any of them opening them or they might glance at them put them down and give them to someone who 5 minutes later would do the same. After about 25 minutes the woman who first had them decided to stamp them and gave them back to us so we were allowed into no mans land. Next was into China where we heard from a couple on the Halong tip they were kept in quarantine for 24 hours because they had a temperature of 37.1. My worries that the hotel in Hanoi had fixed us up with a dodgy Chinese visa proved unfounded and on we went into the next stop on the adventure.

As soon as you crossed the border the differences were very obvious, suddenly the constant SE Asia language of the car horn was no longer audible and the mopeds had been replaces by real cars as the choice of transport. The bus we got was grand again except for Mary getting squashed by some guy in front of her with his seat back. It took 5 hours to get to Nanning where we pulled into a giant bus station which was the size of Dublin airport almost. Had my first vision of what troubles might lie ahead when I saw the destinations board with about 5,000 little squiggles and symbols representing towns and places that I’d never probably known existed but were twice the size of Ireland. I took to wondering how much it would cost to approach a local who had some English and ask him to accompany us for the next 4 weeks. But where would be the fun in that.

We were brought to an office and told that we would have to wait 3 hours for our next bus onwards to Guilin and it would be after midnight when we got there. These wasn’t the most welcoming of news, there were 3 Germans with us too so we just looked at each other, what could we do about it. We got a free meal in some canteen which was a matter of looking at all the dishes and trying to figure out which one didn’t make barking noises when it was alive or which one hadn’t got chickens toe nails in it. Then we sat around upstairs trying best to return all the stares we were getting of the local Chinese, I think we should start charging people who stare at us for longer than 5 seconds, it would keep us in rice for a while anyhow. Coca Cola looks almost the same in Chinese so we grabbed a bottle of that found an ATM and sat down for a while.

The bus left early and luckily we had followed the Germans or else we probably would have missed it. I think the buses in China are of pretty good standard and on this one we got green tea flavored bread, on the last on we got a can of sweetened rice and bean curd or something. The amazement over the food multiplied ten fold when we stopped at a shop and in the snack aisle which normally would have crisps or something there was little vacuum packs of evreypart of the chicken imaginable. Including the claws, the heart, little chicken wings; all very appetizing I am sure, not sure which I’d rather for a snack Cambodian cockroaches or greasy chicken claws.

The rain started pouring down during our journey and was still bucketing when we arrived in Guilin at about 00.00. We found a taxi easy outside and pointed to the Chinese words for our hostel in our Lonely planet, it think this is the way to do things as we arrived no bother and coast less than a Euro for about 2km. the hostel was still busy with people sitting around at that time which was comforting and they had kept our reservation, no room for the Germans who had come along with us though so they headed back out into the rain. The room in Guilin Backstreet Hostel was grand, basic and a bit damp but did the job. We got a beer to chill out then headed to sleep on the hardest beds I have ever slept on.

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