Vietnam
Finally made it to Vietnam, a chance to relax on the beach etc etc only for it to rain non stop !, should have longer in China, the weather was really nice the last few days !. But lovely just to forget bus timetables etc and catch up with English news, sports etc.
Journey from Guilin easy enough. Bus to Nanning and then Dongxing on the border, all on good roads. Having taken the coastal road before I knew it was a poor road but then most roads in Vietnam are. Unfortunately they have dug it up to expand it so it was a hell of a journey. Worse is the never ending huge great jugernaults doing the China route so plenty of holds up as everything got snarled up and then having to entangle themselves. As if things couldn’t get worse from Halong Bay we had to tow a broken down bus. This wouldn’t have been so bad if it wasn’t for the fact the tow “rope” was old bicycle tyres. So everytime we had to stop to let someone off the tyres broke on the restart so then had to get our tyres fixed. For anyone familar with Top Gear in Vietnam, Halong Bay was where they crossed the water to CatBa and the fun they had had to make me laugh as we tried to reenact it. Then to hit the motorbike madness of Haiphong City in rush hour towing another vehicle was an accident waiting to happen. In China you can travel thousands of miles and rarely see an accident, in Vietnam they have display boards with running counts. On this occassion we saw 3 majors, two with vehicles going off the road and turning over and one splattered motorcyclists. Vietnamese roads are not for the faint hearted, everyone gets a moped for their first birthday but it hasn’t occured to anyone to build proper roads.
But now no more travelling and hopefully the sun will come out at some point.
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