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November 24, 2005
Friendship Pass: Nanning to Hanoi
(On Monday I made an uneventful 100 Yuan bus trip from Yangshuo back to Nanning. My visa for Vietnam was ready and a 138 Yuan bus ticket to Hanoi needed securing.)
Tuesday morning, bright and early at 0730, my bus departed for Hanoi. It was a very modern bus with large, business-class seats, unnecessary air-conditioning, an audio/visual system, and a friendly stewardess that spoke a few bits of English. Our route to Pingxiang, the last remaining Chinese town before the boarder, was a mixture of new highways and old country roads that took five hours to navigate. We stopped in Pingxiang to have our free lunch and pickup some more passengers, namely two western guys. One of them, Levine from Germany, was haggling with an illegal money changer for a good Yuan-to-Dong conversion rate. I settled quickly for 1800 Dong/Yuan although the inter-bank rate is ~1940. Levine did a bit better and ended with the moneychanger telling him that he was ‘a little bit Chinese’. It was a nice compliment.
Joining us on the bus with Levine was a 70-year old Dutch-Ozzie man who had been teaching English in China for a wee bit. He was a nice enough chap but I didn’t really speak much at first. Our bus trip to the border region was fairly short and bumpy. We soon ran into several kilometers of freight lorries heading south that were waiting on the side of the road with engines off and drivers asleep. Our bus driver soon gave up trying to plot a course down the tiny road and instructed us all to get off and walk the remaining distance to the boarder.
The Dutch gentleman quickly went ballistic. It turns out that he had two large, airport friendly (read ‘totally inappropriate for this kind of travel’) suitcases and a large plastic shopping bag full of stuff. I quickly put on my 17kg rucksack and left for the boarder…before he looked to me for any help. Near the end of the 2km walk he had nearly caught up with me—some nice fellow put his bags on a hand cart and pushed them to the door of the Chinese boarder complex.
The Chinese side of the Friendship Pass boarder is dotted with several buildings. I was too scared to take many pictures so entered the immigration and customs building quickly. After receiving an exit stamp I navigated my way through the construction-zone of a building with lots of helpful signs…in Chinese only. Thinking quickly, I just followed the Chinese guys who were on my bus. He he…it worked.
There is about a 200m walk downhill accross the official territorial boarder and the Vietnamese immigration building . It was a really strange experience walking in that no man’s land between countries that reminded me of those cold war thrillers where the spy walks across the bridge to the West German side in some sort of dodgy prisoner exchange.
The Vietnamese immigrations and customs hall was in great need of a process consultant. Nobody knew what was going on, required forms were hidden away at the end of the hall (not near the entrance where they were needed), etc. The Vietnamese immigration officer did not like my passport at all and inspected it for a good twenty minutes while he thumbed through the pages, compared the Hippy Stu picture with my present appearance, examined the two 20-page passport supplements, and scrutinized many pages/stamps with some sort of special light scanning device. In the end all was good and he let me enter Vietnam without the rubber glove treatment. I was the second person to reach our new bus that would take us all to Hanoi. Yippee.
Everyone made it through the boarder we hopped onto a new bus at about 1330. The Dutch-Austrailian man was in some sort of tizzy because the Chinese boarder official was confused with his visa and an evidently erroneously granted/issued visa extension. It took him a good twenty minutes to clear Chinese immigration and by that time Our Dear Dutchy was all worked up. Levine was being very understanding, patient and sympathetic to him. After hearing a few bitches like “Why do these people make it so complicated?� and “I just don’t understand!� I moved forward a few rows, cracked open an ice cold Tiger Beer (12,000 Vietnamese Dong), and started grooving to The English Beat on my iPod.
About two hours latter the batteries on my iPod expired so I started speaking to Levine and Dutch-boy again. Apparently, while in my own little world, driver explained to everyone that we were due into Hanoi around 1800 or so, which sent the Dutch man into his third tantrum of the day. He was expecting the bus to arrive in Hanoi at the scheduled 1500, which was enough time to take the one hour taxi to the airport where he was planning to catch a 1700 flight to Saigon and then an onward flight to Sydney, Australia. I was absolutely flabbergasted by his incredibly delicate itinerary. Even back in Switzerland or America or Europe it would be downright foolish to plan so tightly for a back-to-back Train-to-Bus-to-Taxi-to-Airplane-to-Airplane journey! But this bloody idiot thought he could travel through rural China, across the Chinese-Vietnamese boarder, and down into Vietnam like he had some sort of magical charm that would ensure success.
We stopped for a pottie break, I bought another bear, fell sound asleep for another hour…and completely tuned out from all the drama that the idiotic Dutch-boy was suffering. He was still raving about how ‘these people’ were thwarting his travel plans when I awoke.
At about 1700 we pull off the side of the road outside of Hanoi. It was rush hour. The bus driver waves down a taxi for the Dutch Ozzie for his hopeless passage to the airport. The rest of the passengers gather their luggage and leave. Levine and I are a bit stumped about what is going on but take it in stride and get back onto the bus. Twenty minutes later, this beautiful, young English-speaking Vietnamese lady boards the bus and tells us that a) the bus is not going into Hanoi during rush hour, b) it just happens that the bus is run by a company that owns a hotel in the old quarter, and c) she would love to take us to her hotel in a subsidized taxi. My ‘bull shit’ indicator started beeping very loudly at that moment and we started quizzing her about all the specifics…I was not happy. After agreeing to the 15,000 Dong taxi fare each (same as it would have been from the bus station into the Old Quarter) we hop into a small, new taxi and head into town. An hour later Levine and I had exchanged emails, Pam and I finally met up at the Tin Tin Hotel (270,000 Dong / night) and the two of us headed of for dinner at some nice Italian place.
By golly, Hanoi has changed since I was last here in the summer of 2000.
Posted by stu at November 24, 2005 01:53 PM