I want magic bus - you can't have it, or I call that a bargain, the best I've ever had

N 22 19.963 E 103 50.598 1504m - Sapa, Vietnam - 22 November 2008

(Funny, as I write this, I am sitting in a sort of cafe in Sapa, Vietnam, the day is foggy out, it is early and people are starting to move around, but I can just see out of the corner of my eye two women, in brightly colored hill people sort of costumes just dying to catch my eye so they can get me to buy some embroidery or something like that. This has been going on for at least 10 minutes now.)

Our visas expire on the 21st and we need to be out of China by then. We go through all sorts of different plans for our last week in China to try and get to the border in time yet still see some things. Our bird trip in Sichuan was sort of longer than originally planned, but that's fine, it was great and worth the time, probably the best part of the whole China trip.

But Kunming is the next stop after Chengdu and we don't have a lot of plans for it, hopefully try to get to Dali or somewhere nice. Kunming is more or less another big Chinese city and is mostly nice for just a bit of rest and recovery after lots of travel through Sichuan. There doesn't seem to be time for Dali so we go to Yuanyang instead.

Now to get out of Yuanyang, there is a 7 am bus to Hekou and it is about 150 km to there. Not sure how long it will take. The border closes at 5 pm and we need to be out today. Once we are across, then we can either stay in Lao Cai (hopefully not, apparently it is the Most Boring Town In The World) or try to get to Sapa. Minibuses are supposed to only run until early afternoon and might not be running when we finally make it across. But we are optimistic, it is only 150 km, how long could that take? We have water and some biscuits and nuts and should be ok for food and water.

Well, the 720 bus isn't exactly a 720 bus. It is strange, every other bus we have taken in China, it is scheduled for like 1130 and it either completely full or everybody is on the bus by 11 and it leaves at 1105, so we are taking no chances. We would have missed our bus to Yuanyang from our connection in Guiju if somebody hadn't come to find us to let us know it was leaving. (Of course in Russia, the bus would have just left and it would have taken us ages to find out and the next bus would have been tomorrow.) So, we are taking no chances and we show up at 645.

Funny then, the bus station (luckily it is just about 10 meters from our hotel) is almost completely deserted, except for one woman in the ticket booth (or maybe it was more the parking lot, the bus station was both) warming herself over a small fire. We say we are going to Hekou and she laughs because we are so early. Ok, she also laughs because we mispronounce it badly, which happens a lot, no matter how many times we hear something pronounced, we just can't quite get it.

Another hour then in the dawn and cold people start showing up and loading onto the bus. We are happy we are the first stop because buses fill fast and getting on later might not go so well with a full bus. We leave at like 8, or maybe it was later than that and start heading down the hills. The fog that surrounded Yuanyang for most of the time we were there seems to have lifted and it is quite pretty. We stop at the main bus station for the town, already an hour late there, see some really tempting looking sleeper buses and then head on.

We have another hour going down to get to the new town. Yuanyang is split into new town and old town. The scenery is still nice, starting to get more tropical, the beginning of bananas and all that. In new town we drop off a few passengers and pick up some new ones. One family looks like they are moving house, huge bags and a room fan. (Take note of this family, they will be important later.) Twice in China, once in Beijing and then again in Kunming, we posted a whole lot of things out of our bags back to Australia and the decrease in weight has been lovely. This last time was finally the end of the camping things, our sleeping bags and a few other things like that. Up until China, I had been a bit embarrassed by how much stuff we were carrying, but on all the buses, we generally have had the least amount of stuff, their loads consisted of gigantic builder bags which took two people to carry.

Outside of new town, we stop again for quite a while. There is a convergence of our bus and a few minibuses and a whole lot of passengers and baggage. We must spend at least 30 minutes here as the driver smokes and people argue about who will get on the bus and what bags they can take, or whether they will take a minibus. The Chinese woman in front of us yells let's go in Chinese. We wait longer and finally there is a bit of movement. A few more passengers load on with their seed bags and mud covered spades and hoes.

Then this next part of the trip is quite a blur for me. We go for hours on really bad roads. It is the smokiest bus we have been on in China, most everybody smokes, not just a chain smoking driver. At least we can open the window to try and get some of the smoke out. (Also note this point for later in the story.)

The most frustrating part of the trip, well, ok I have to put C's sweater against the window frame (another point to note for later) and lean on it instead of banging my arm in the same place for hours as we go over bumpy bad roads. The most frustrating part though is that we spend almost this entire time driving under a really plush looking expressway. I see a sign, Hekou is still 87 km away, according to the sign on the expressway. We slowly come to 83 km and I stop looking after that.

In a way, this expressway sort of symbolizes a lot that I found in China. There is this luxurious road, raised up on pillars for miles and miles across the land, bulldozed across the landscape. It looks nice and brand new but also it appears to be cracking and falling apart already. We don't use it, I assume it isn't finished yet or is too expensive for normal people (or people who ride on buses instead of taking their own car). The road isn't used by locals who have had their road destroyed by the heavy traffic using it (and probably by the traffic required to create a huge road like that) and live underneath the pillars out of sight of those on the expressway.

We continue under the expressway for hours, along side the Red River on one side and miles and miles of banana trees on the other side. There also appear to be pineapples and huge plantations of some sort of sap tree, not maple as far as I could tell, or maple that I know, with collection cups on each of them. We stop a one town and the child behind me leans out the window and throws up, into my window. I get some on me but C's sweater gets the worst of it. She is completely pissed off, I'm mostly just a bit shocked. She finds a plastic bag to wrap it in, we clean up the best we can and she scowls at the kid for much of the rest of the journey.

Ok, it is just too long and too much to write about the rest of the bumps and the rest of that. Hekou, finally at like 4 pm, after about 8 hours of traveling. I guess that does sort of average about 20 km/hour. We rush through Hekou, do we cross first to get it all done and out in time or find something to eat?

Our last Chinese meal is some fast food place, they put bits of different dishes on a place, I guess an all you can eat thing. It is all a bit cold but isn't horrible. I'm pretty tired and out of it by now, so it doesn't really matter much. I will miss Chinese food though, what a great run of great food we had there.

The road leading up to the border is quite fantastic. There are hundreds of different sort of handcarts, big wagons, fully packed bicycles, and anything else that could carry anything by hand filled with boxes and vegetables and all sorts of goods, all lined up to cross over into Vietnam.

We pass through customs and exit the country, not such an ordeal as I might have expected. They x-ray our bags and then ask to see what books we have. The rumor is that they are confiscating Lonely Planet China guides, not liking some of the content, mostly at the Hekou border crossing. No idea why they would do it leaving the country, maybe just because they can. Searching for other Hekou border crossings seems to bring up lots of tales of woe. But we flummoxed them, I pull out a Birds of China book as well as two Chinese dictionaries (we love China, you know) and we had also posted our China guide from Kunming and switched over to a generic SE Asia guide. So we didn't have anything for them to take. Ha.

We cross the bridge to Vietnam and we are out. No visa worries now for about a month when our Vietnam one will run out, but we should be out of here way before that.

Outside of the border, we are immediately hit upon by the touts. Motorcycle taxis, buses, loads of crap to buy. We know the minibus to Sapa should cost about 30,000 dong (about $2) per person but don't quite know where the bus station is or where to catch the bus. We get loads of offers to get us to the bus station and then to Sapa starting at like 100,000. The guide says the station is like 3 km away, which probably isn't so bad to walk but no idea what way it is. We finally get one guy down to 75k (yeah, totally overcharged us but we are tired) for a ride to the station and then to Sapa on a minibus. A security guard watches the whole transaction is amused by the foreigners getting ripped off. Ok, it is only about $1, but the principal of the thing really annoys me.

I think he goes off to find the minibus to bring it to us, which makes it a little less painful, instead of just flagging down a passing one with Sapa clearly marked on the front of it. At least I hope so. We have a bit of a commotion paying him, making sure that he actually pays the minibus instead of just taking the money and running. He does run because he gave me 2500 for change instead of 25,000. Ok, I can handle bargaining badly and getting ripped off that way but getting short changed, that sucks. We get the minibus to circle around looking for him and C goes and yells at him to get the correct change. Yes, that's pretty cool. He laughs and gives us the correct change then and thinks we will do ok in Vietnam.

The minibus then goes to the bus station. Ok, figures. Then cruises around town to look for more passengers, another 30 minutes of that, picking up a few locals and finally head off towards Sapa. Sapa is straight out of town and up a mountain. We climb and climb and head back into the fog. The roads seem a little bit more civilized than in China and get excited to see a couple riding up the hill with my panniers and a nice looking touring bike. Sigh, if we could have done that. China, I think I would have been scared riding on those roads, but here seems like it would be doable.

In Sapa then, hostel touts appear out of the fog and mob around us. We try to get a different spirit about them, instead of getting down about it, see if it can be nice. A group of like five of us head over a few blocks towards the hotel section of town and we tour three different rooms to see what they have, get the different option packages and make a choice. They all seem like nice rooms, range from $8-10, then you can have a heater for another $1-3, or a dvd player or better windows, or internet in the hotel, etc, etc. Friendly Hotel seems fine, the host is helpful, let's just stay there. We also look at the Lonely Planet recommended ones for fun, but they are all full. I guess it is a bit lazy, just picking the ones in there, but it must be like gold when a hotel gets a mention in there.

The town is foggy and we can't see anything. We walk around town looking for dinner and have a a look at a lot of menus, most of them are pretty expensive (ok on a relative Vietnam scale). We wrongly pick the less expensive one and the meal is pretty boring and bland and not great. But we are so tired by then it doesn't really matter. It was something and now we can go back and go to sleep. In bed by 9.30, does it get any better than that? Welcome to Vietnam. I better get my bargaining skills honed quite quickly or I will be in trouble.