Rice is Nice

Stephen and I left Hong Kong on Monday, after a breakfast of pancakes and English muffins courtesy of our host, Mrs. A. We realized, a bit late, that we needed to make a run for the border or we had no chance of catching the last trains possible that would allow us to meet our friends in Hanoi at the appointed time. So we took a taxi to the Hung Hom train station. The train across the border into Guangzhou (aka "Canton") was comfortable and uneventful. At Guangzhou, we took a taxi across town (seemingly a huge city) to another train station, only to find that the night train to Nanning only had standing room available. We weren't excited about the prospect of standing all night, so we made for the bus station, but not before Stephen walked away from his bag. Fortunately, the bag was still there, and the bus station was nearby. Unfortunately, the heat was oppressive. But we bought tickets for a sleeper bus to Nanning without a problem. We went down toward the Pearl River and ate in a large, anonymous restaurant atop what seemed to be a wholesale market for cheap jewelry. This is several stops upstream in the supply chain from Claire's Boutique.

The night train to Nanning was not comfortable. The beds were short enough that anybody over 5'10" or so would have to sleep in a stress position. The narrowness wasn't a problem, but it was necessary to buckle one's self in to avoid falling out of the bunk around turns. Annoyingly, a kung fu movie was played at high volume for the first 90 minutes or so. Then we took an interminably long break at a rest station for no apparent reason. After that, the bus continued in silence, and I slept fitfully on the top right bunk. (The bunks are three abreast, and two high.) When we arrived in Nanning, we were able to go ahead and buy a ticket for another bus to Pingxiang, near the Vietnamese border. The landscape along the drive was already more lush than what we were used to, and the people along the side of the road sported the conical grass hats that one sees in Vietnam. At the Pingxiang station, we negotiated to take a "cyclo," which is basically a motorcycle with a cab attached about 15km to the border. We also sold our last RMB for Vietnamese dong.

At the border, we had to carry our stuff a few hundred meters. There, one passes a mildewy, yellow structure, the kind that is common in Vietnam. Men sat on the porch smoking, with a sign nearby that merely said "French style building." This would date from a time when France controlled not only Vietnam, but its links to China and the railroad in that part of China. A bit further, we passed under an imposing stone archway, and then onto a large, modern customs facility. The Chinese border check was a model of efficiency, and a stark contrast to what was to come. After getting the requisite stamps, we walked across the border a few yards into Vietnam, and the border check there.

Good-bye to China at the Friendship Gate

The Vietnamese border check process was frustrating, and a discouraging start to my month in this country. The building is the kind of depressing, anonymous structure with flickering fluorescent lights that makes one want to just doze off. And the workers there were half-way there. One goes to the second window to get a card. You fill out the card. You take the card and your passport to the first window. They look at your passport closely and make faces like they've never seen a foreign passport before. In my case, they picked at the laminate covering my picture to the point that they nearly tore off that layer, which pissed me off. This took about half an hour. The computer breaks, they call people, they process 100 Chinese passports, and they get back to yours. Then, you get your passport back with the wrong card. Then you insist that they find the right card. Then you go back to the second window with half the card, and give it to them, and pay 2,000 dong (about USD 0.12). Then, you put your bag through a "metal detector," though there's no screen on which anybody watches what's in your bag. Finally, you walk out, and you're free to explore Vietnam, more or less.

People sometimes say that Vietnam is like China ten years ago. But I'm not even sure that there is anything approaching unanimity, or even a dominant majority, of the Vietnamese CP that really wants this to be an easy, efficiently-run country. Instead, they seem content to breed fear of foreigners to justify the tight security. The infrastructure in China is impressive, even by Western standards. In Vietnam, it is passable. And it's not clear that anything of significance has been built since independence.

We got a taxi to Lang Son, the nearest town. In Lang Son, we sat around for a while, politely declining the bia hoi (fresh-made beer) offered to us, on account of the sketchy ice. Finally, the van left for Hanoi, stopping several times along the way to dump people out and pick people up at country crossroads. A few hours later, we arrived at our hotel in Hanoi.

Muneesha and Jae, the friends we were to meet, were late arriving from Cambodia, but they made it. And our hotel, the Win Hotel, was well-located and clean. I highly recommend it.