A Journey to Well Known Places

It has been an exhausting three days of travel. We took a night bus from Lijaing to Kunming, my first in China. The ride took about nine hours. It is not a bad way to travel if you are small. The beds are tiny so our guest house got us berths in the back of the bus where we could sleep together. The back of the sleeper buses is one big futon. Our bus had five people in the back. We are literally shoulder to shoulder. This was fine for Erica cause she was on the edge. I, however, was wedged between an Chinese man with bad breath and Erica. The Chinese man was much more interested in cuddling than Erica was too. After an hour or so of motion people started falling asleep. Then, subtly, the man rolled over on his side to face me. He lifted his leg and slid it over mine. I pushed it down. Twenty minutes later he did the same thing. Again I pushed it down. This time though he changed it up and draped his arm across my chest. I pushed his arm aside and scooted away from his. This happened atleast six more times in the night. I slept maybe three hours. When we arrived in Kunming Erica was rested and I was exhausted. It was 6am. We took a cab back to the Camellia hotel and plotted our options. We were going to stay the night in Kunming and take a night bus to the border the next day, but we ran into a tour group that said they were on their way out that morning. Why not push through we said, so we bought more bus tickets for that morning and had breakfast.

When I bought the tickets I asked the man behind the counter how long the ride was, maybe 8 or 9 hours he said. That sort of ambiguity should have tipped me off. The ride started out innocuous enough, although we were given an unusually large amount of trash bags. I thought nothing of it. The first five hours were on the highway. We stopped for a bathroom break and again for dinner a few hours later. That’s when the puking started. Our highway gradually got smaller and smaller. We entered a mountain range and started to descend. The road became more and more winding and motion sickness really kicked in. Sounds of heaving could be heard all over the bus. The smell of vomit accented the recycled bus air. At hour eight the bus stopped again. Several people were on hands and knees heaving. After ten mintues we boarded the bus again and set off. We left at 12:40 and it was getting dark outside. Good thing too. Sitting in the window seat I could see the wheels of our bus narrow graze the edge of the road. There was no shoulder and in the darkness I could not see the bottom of the valley below. It took us another three hours of winding and heaving to reach the border town of Hekou and not a sinlge person was sad to get off the bus. The ride took 11 hours.

Hekou is a border town, but in all other respects is fairly nondescript. We found a hotel, spent the night, and started looking for the border the next morning. It was easy to find. We just had to follow the line of truck backed up along the main street. We filled out exit cards and prepared to enter Vietnam. Oh, I asked, where do I change my Chinese money to Vietnamese money? The customs man shrugged. Maybe the bank he said. OK. I asked someone else. Oh, there are some banks around the corner. They will do it. Nope. In what turned out to be a remarkable run around, even for China, we went to three banks and waited outside money changing place. The whole ordeal took three and half hours. No one would do it because it was Saturday. The final word was that we would have to wait until Monday. We were resigned to staying the weekend in Hekou, then we decided we would just hang on to our RMB and change it in Bangkok. Again we headed for the border. In line a man asked if we wanted to change RMB for Vietnamese Dong. I said yes and made the change. The rate was far less than desirable, but we got some money to move around. The ATMs in the Vietnamese border, town Lao Cai, don’t work on Saturday so we would have been in trouble if we did not have Dong. What a hassle!

OK, on to Sapa, the quaint little moutain town, we go. We refused a ride from the pushy guy that stopped us just outside the border check point and walked to the bus station. We ended up taking a private bus because the public bus would not be leaving for two more hours. This is a pretty good option in Vietnam, but it was a learning experience for us. Buses don’t leave until they are packed to the gills and we were the first ones on. It took another hour and half of waiting in the stiffling heat for the bus to fill to capacity with passengers and parcels. Finally, we were off. The whole ride took thirty minutes. I was peeved when we arrived. It is a holiday weekend and all the hotels in town were full. One of the guest house owners arranged for us to sleep on a spare mattress at her cousins house. It was a less than ideal accomodation, but better than sleeping in the street. Tonight we have a proper room with a big comfortable bed. I think we will stay for a while and regroup before we venture out again.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, July 15th, 2007 at 8:15 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.