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Day 70 - Bus to China4 Dec 2007
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Our train deposited us, somewhat sleep deprived, back in Hanoi at 5am. What a different city without the millions of scooters buzzing about. We headed back to our previous hotel in the Old Quarter and negotiated use of a room for a couple of hours before heading off to the bus station to catch our bus through to Nanning in China. It was packed with Asian men and no other white faces in sight.
I had suffered some motion sickness on the train back from Lao Cai and so popped a couple of Phenergans before getting on the bus as a safety precaution. Bad move!!!....I seemed to just float in and out of consciousness the entire day. Usually I try to keep the girls busy with some activities but they had to fend for themselves today. I do recall Alessandra patting me on the arm a few times but god knows what she wanted! What I did see of the trip from the border through to Nanning was most impressive. The border facilities were huge and modern with over-sized golf carts to ferry us around. We travelled on a massive Expressway with beautiful gardens along the median strip. Towering karst formations lined our route for much of the journey with sugar cane plantations on either side. The countryside was remarkably devoid of people in comparison to the Vietnamese countryside.
We arrived at the bus station in Nanning at 5pm. We were all starving and the KFC sign was a very welcome sight but unfortunately there had been no money exchange facilities at the border, they didn't take visa and there were no ATMs at the bus station. It was incredibly difficult to find anyone who spoke even a couple of words of English (not even the lady on the Information Desk at the bus station) and with virtually all information written in Chinese characters it was far from easy to make progress. The Manager at KFC eventually assisted us to organise a taxi into the city to an ATM machine and then bring us back. Nanning is a city of 3.5 million people and it looked super modern and cosmpolitan. The high rise buildings were all lit up with spectacular lighting.
After gorging ourselves on KFC we found a sleeper bus and jumped on for the 790km trip to Guangzhou. The girls floated off to sleep but Phil and I were becoming rather worried by about 11:30pm because we were definitely not on the Expressway and it was one hell of a slow, rough ride on a road filled with trucks. I was kicking myself for buying tickets off a tout rather than at the proper ticket windows and that we had scored ourselves a total lemon which might take 14 or 15 hours rather than the advertised 12. We finally dozed off in the early hours despite the jerking around.
