Chinabites

Posted: Nov. 04, 2009

This is part one of a two part series covering Chinabites’ (only slightly involuntary) border crosing into Vietnam. We cover some of the mundane details of travel in hopes that the information may be of use to other travelers, but loyal Chinabites readers will be happy to see reports of the good eats encountered along the way. Part two here.

About the best that a ne’erdowell American can do these days in terms of a China visa is a year-long multi-entry business visa with a mandatory exit every 90 days. Being required to phsyically exit China every three months is definitely a pain, but I try and think of it as enforcing a healthy regimen of international travel.

Living in Kunming, there are quite a few interesting, affordable options for international travel within striking distance. Yunnan shares a border with Vietnam, Laos, and Burma. Thailand and Cambodia are a hop, skip, and a jump beyond those. Possibly the most accessible country is Laos, where, if you are an American at least, you can show up at the border and get a visa on the spot. Good to know if you ever had to flee the country for some reason! A trip to Vietnam, on the other hand, takes about a week of lead time if you’re originating from Kunming.

I’d heard good things about Vietnam from a handful of friends in Kunming. Compared Thailand, or even Laos, however, a relatively low number of people had actually crossed the Vietnamese border. To do so, starting from Kunming, requires a trip to the Vietnam consulate in Kunming, located on the fifth floor of Hongta Tower (红塔大厦). They are open from 9am-12pm and from 2:00pm-6:00pm. You need to bring a 3cm x 4cm photo of yourself, pay RMB 350, and fill out an application. You have to leave your passport with the consulate and then pick it up from them again three working days later.

The Vietnamese consulate in Kunming issued me a month long Visa with a single entry. One tricky thing to note is that the Visa appears to have an “X” stamped on multiple entry, which would lead one to believe that it was a multi-entry visa. In fact, the “X” over “multiple entries” means that this option has been eliminated. Poor visa UI design. I digress.

Once you have your visa in hand, you can head for the border. Hekou is the border town on the Chinese side of the China-Vietnam border. The fastest way to get there from Kunming is by bus along a just-completed highway. You can do it in a straight shot on a day-long or overnight bus, but the border itself closes at 5pm every day, so it’s almost certainly going to be a two day trip from Kunming. I decided not to do the trip in one shot. I broke the bus ride up with an overnight stay in the capital city of Honghe Prefacture, Mengzi. Express buses to Mengzi’s new bus terminal (新客运站) leave from Kunming’s Nanyao Bus Station (南窑客运站) 3-4 times per day. The ticket was RMB 90 and the ride was an uneventful, barely interrupted, five hour straight shot through lightly terraced hills and fields.

Mengzi is quite large, much larger than I expected. The capital building and grounds there are far larger and grander than the provincial capital in Kunming and feature a gigantic golden bull bathed in glorious fountains and slightly less glorious Chinese pop classics, blasted over speakers on the public square.

You can make out the outline of a charging bull, glowing golden, in the center of the fountain.

I took a cab from the new bus station into town, asking the cabbie to take me to a hotel in the RMB 100 / night range. I figured that price (about USD 15) gave me a fighting chance of having wi-fi in the rooms. I was wrong, but that didn’t matter because Mengzi is one of the 285 cities in China that is covered by Unicom 3G! So I just tethered my iPhone to my computer and was emailing away as usual. The hotel, the Guan Bao, was RMB 120 / night (talked down from 150) and pleasant enough, but walking around the neighborhood later that evening I found a couple OK places that had internet in the rooms for about RMB 70 / night. The Guanbao did provide a free breakfast ticket.

Lodging secured, it was time for dinner. There was no shortage of restaurants in the 3 block radius of my hotel that I walked and many were still open at 9pm, putting Kunming to shame. I stopped in at a point-and-shoot mom and pop style “Da Pai Dang”, where I inadvertantly got one of the best meals I’ve had in Yunnan. It started with pork short ribs fried with garlic on a bed of flash fried mint leaves.

And finished with a wonderful hot and sour soup with thick slices of tender, salving taro root to balance to the spice.

All washed down with a cold beer. Pop, of “mom and pop” fame, charged me RMB 25 for the meal, quite expensive, but it really was a special meal and I didn’t want to ruin it by arguing over the seven or eight kuai they overcharged me. I returned home, popping in for about 3 seconds to the hotel bar, where I was immediately jumped upon by a crowd of Chinese men too drunk to speak their own language and all trying to speak mine. Not fancying an evening of being pawed by dudes and forced to do shots of grain alcohol, I returned to my room to do some more 3G enabled emailing. The internet to the rescue again!

The next morning, literally awoken by a rooster (seems to always be a rooster nearby in Chinese cities with populations under 2 million), I blearily stumbled down to what I imagined would be a weak “continental” breakfast of rice-porridge and pickled vegetables. I knew it was going to be a good day when I saw that instead of watery gruel there was a huge, steaming bowl of over-the-bridge noodles, with all the fixin’s, prepared for each guest who came to breakfast. Mengzi is apparently famous for this dish and the Guanbao Hotel didn’t want visitors to miss out.

Full from breakfast, I hopped in a cab back to the bus station ready to head for Hekou and the border, only to find out that the only buses to Hekou left from the old bus station. One long public bus ride around the enchanting and huge Nanhu park later, I arrived at the old bus station and purchased an RMB 40, high speed bus ticket to Hekou. The trip took exactly two hours and deposited us 1 minute from the actual border, a bridge between Hekou and Laocai, Vietnam.

Walking through on the Chinese side was a breeze. I was just a tad bit nervous because I was exiting, somewhat precariously, on the 90th day of my 90 day Visa - if anything went wrong I was facing RMB 500 / day fines. I had actually counted the days out from my last entrance on Aug. 5 to be sure. Speaking Chinese really comes in handy in these situations. Because the math is onerous to calculate, the border guards were lazy and just took my word for it, a courtesy I can barely imagine being extended to a non-Chinese speaking foreigner. One of the border guards was a very enthusiastic young man who wanted to learn English. His name was Sydney and he insisted that we exchange emails. Since he was holding my unstamped passport, I decided that this would be a great opportunity to make a new language partner friend.

Walking across the bridge into northern Vietnam was wonderful. There is no military presense on the bridge itself and no one said I couldn’t, so I took a panorama photo standing in the middle of the bridge on a gorgeous, sunny day.

I walked into the immigration building on the Vietnamese side and the officials there were friendly, but not talkative. I was the only western tourist I saw crossing in the half an hour or so I spent in the bridge area. Having done some reading and Google map work before crossing the border, I knew that aggressive locals would be waiting to offer me great deals on money exchange and rides to wherever I needed to go immediately as I stepped into Vietnam. Sure enough, not 1.5 seconds after I was an arms length away from the official who stamped my passport, Mr. Sketchy was already offering me a motorbike ride to Sapa and did I need to change money? I managed to give off enough “leave-me-alone” vibe that he drifted away after only half a block. I walked about two kilometers, into Lao Cai proper, to find the train station and buses to Sapa.

There was an ATM on the square and I pulled USD 50 in Vietnames Dong out of it with a Visa debit card. There were no mini-buses going to Sapa until the evening train came in at 5:30pm. I decided to cool my heels on the open-air, 10th floor rooftop bar of the hotel directly adjoining the train-station square. It turned out to be a great choice. I killed a 30,000 Dong (USD 2) mango juice and about 2 hours on the roof with a commanding view of Lao Cai and three very friendly Vietnamese waitresses who I peppered ceaselessly with questions about Vietnamese - mostly with the help my iPhone translator because they couldn’t speak any English at all. I learned (and remembered!) to say “You”, “Me”, “go”, “here”, “there”, and “I would like a mango juice, please”. In the process I discovered that they had never been to China, despite living on the border for their entire lives, that they did NOT like Chinese food (booooo…), and that there was a one hour time difference between Vietnam and China.

Finally, the mini-buses to Sapa were coming in and I bid farewell to my erstwhile language tutors. I hopped into a bus full of locals going to Sapa. We stopped in town and picked a few more people up. No one spoke any English. There was a dude with one arm and three members of the Hmong minority in full Black Hmong get-up. We were parked for about 10 minutes outside of an amazing knife-makers shop. Outside of the shop they had a makeshift furnace and anvil. They were heating a bar of iron or steel that was no less than least two inches in diameter almost white hot in the furnace. A man then extracted it with tongs and held it with tongs on an anvil with one hand, while placing a spike on the red hot ingot with another set of tongs. Then a barefoot man would swing a sledgehammer onto the spike while the first man rotated the ingot. The purpose was to create a slug of metal about 2 inches long and two inches around from the iron bar.

The finished knives hung in the foreground. It seemed to me that it would take about a half hour of banging and reheating to finally break a slug off - and it happened that while we were parked he did break one off. It made me glad that I am writing software for a living - beats banging on metal.

The next post in this series will cover arrival in Sapa and the good eats encountered upon arrival! I’ll leave you all for now with a little video showing how to make a knife, the hard way, straight from Lao Cai, Vietnam.