We leave Nanning on the 7.30am express coach and arrive in Hanoi at 2.30pm. Getting through border controls is quite painless and nothing like the prolonged affair we experienced getting into China. We arrive at the Chinese border and transfer with luggage to electric buggy which ferries through passport control and then on to the Vietnamese border where we join the bus for the onward journey to Hanoi. The road from the border hugs the mountains which rise perpendicular from the rice paddies and little villages are strung out along the road side. The architecture has a colonial feel – houses are tall and narrow with balustrades and colourfully painted fronts. As we approach Hanoi the landscape is much flatter and the mountains recede into the distance. There are very few cars on the road, the main forms of transport are scooters and motor cycles, many loaded up with all manner of things – we see one carrying at least four pigs and another with a substantial tree! We expect to be dropped at one of Hanoi’s four bus stations, but are left outside a hotel, where exactly we don’t know and told that there is an ATM just around the corner. Fortunately the ATM is not too far away and it gives us cash, which is a relief and we are able to complete the journey by taxi.
There seems to be scam going here which, in our case, involved a Vietnamese woman boarding the coach just before it arrived in Hanoi. She approaches all the foreigners to find out if they need accommodation – presumably she and the bus driver are on some kickback from the hotels. She starts off by telling us that we will be dropped at the bus station and she will show us to our accommodation, but when it becomes apparent that none of the foreigners want accommodation, we are all dumped on a hotel forecourt some way from the the city centre and told this is the bus station, which clearly it isn’t! .