We've arrived in Viet Nam! We caught our train from Nanning at 8am on the 14th and spent all of Valentine's Day traveling in trains, xe om, and pedicabs. The ride to Pingxiang (right near the border) took about 4 hours, but then we had to get out and walk to the actual border crossing. Everything went smoothly on the Chinese side, so we walked maybe another half a kilometer to the Vietnamese border to get ourselves through customs. It was fine but the guy who checked our passports almost didn't let me into the country. My passport is an old school one and instead of the picture being printed directly on the page, it was glued in and laminated over. Well, I've since my passport has been swimming in Costa Rica, through the washing machine, and sat on countless times, its beginning to look like crap. The seal on the front of the passport has completely been worn away so that you can't even tell which country issued it. The real problem however, is that the corner of the first page is a little ripped and it just happens that its torn right on the edge of my picture. I'll be honest, it DOES look like I cut open some guy's passport and slipped my photo in. So this Vietnamese guy had a problem with it and after rejecting all my other ID, quizzed me on who I am before finally letting in the country. This isn't really so funny, but the woman who was working with him, the English speaker on duty, kept asking me incomprehensible questions, angrily, after they discovered the tear.
'This your paaporta?'
'Yep'
'Why it get tear?'
'I don't know, its old. I took it into a river in Costa Rica which didn't help.'
'hmmm... trang ig norba doob idefficon?'
'...'
'skippy doo whippa bum!?!? idefficon!?'
'I'll be honest, I have absolutely no idea what you're asking me'
(the man and woman look at each other, annoyed)
'Trang noor doob idefficon!?'
'idefficon??? you're asking me 'idefficon???''
(she nods)
'Oh man...'
So we got into Vietnam, and it turns out there isn't shit on the Vietnamese side of the border. We found one sketchy guy who wanted to give us a lift to Hanoi, but we've discovered that the only people who seem really interested in helping us out are the ones who really want to fuck us. So we blew passed him, and since these people only talk to me and ignore Starr, I had to tell him 100 times to 'fuck off,' but politely. When there didn't seem to be any other options, we went back to the guy to negotiate a price to Lang Son (our Chinese Lonely Planet said that there were trains to Hanoi from there), instead of Hanoi which he wanted 5 or 600 yuan to get us to. He told us 100,000 dong but there was another cab driver close by, a legitimate one, who said 70,000, so he quickly came down to 60. We got in and he drove us, no fucking joke, to the side of the road in the middle of (what looked like) nowhere to some guy in a minibus going to Hanoi. He nods to the guy, and the other driver hops out, opens up our door and tries to load our shit into his minibus. Our driver in his broken English is like, 'he take you to hanoi, good price, ok.' We asked how much and he said 200,000 (although I don't know if he meant 200 total, or 200 for each of us), and while we weren't quite sure what the exchange rate was at the time (that's about 12 bucks by the way) we were pretty sure we were getting robbed. So I kept closing the door on the other driver and getting really fucking angry with the guy (our guide says you should never do this, even in this situation) . No, NO! We paid you to take us to LANG SON, not SCARY GUY. You understand what I say??? Take us to the TRAIN STATION!' He replied 'No Train! No train station!' which later became 'No trains, its new year, no trains!' which later turned into him angrily driving us off in some new direction with his buddy following close behind. He pulled into a town, Lang Son presumably, and then pulled into some parking lot where his buddy pulled in behind so we could start arguing all over again. I just started laughing at that point because this guy was such a fuck, and then when I tried to hand him 60,000 to be done with it, he refused it saying he said meant 60 EACH. I put the money on the ground and told him he could do whatever the fuck he wanted with it. Then Starr and I walked away and got a beer to calm down. She got directions to the train station (1 km away) from these nice ladies who didn't speak a word of English. We hoofed it to the station and caught a train at 1:50 towards Hanoi. By the way, the trains here are really slow and uncomfortable, but it was still an enjoyable 6 hour ride. We got into Hanoi at 7:30 and I love it. I love it so much I would totally live here (Shanghai and Osaka are also future options). The city is dominated by bicycles and small-engined motorcycles and you can hitch a ride on one for practically nothing. In fact, it was raining last night and the guy who runs our hotel came and picked us up on one. He paid another guy standing close by to take me and he took Starr. We just hopped on the back with our packs and then they flew off, true Vietnamese bad-asses. My guy didn't even bother to remove the lit cigarette from his lip while negotiating the ridiculous traffic in the rain. He had a mesh hat on with a camoflauge front and looked like the Vietnamese version of a bow-hunting redneck from Kentucky (sorry Kentucky). We checked in and got dinner in the old city, close to where we're staying. Dinner was delicious (Vietnamese food kicks ass) and cost us like $2. That's only because we ate at a mid-range place according to our Lonely Planet: Southeast Asia.
Anyway, other people want to use this computer so I'm signing off. We booked a 3-day and 2-night junk tour of Halong Bay over the Chinese New Year (Tet in Vietnam) so we have that to look forward to on... Sunday maybe?
