Spending another night at the Cloudland hostel, something I wouldn't have been excited for if I hadn't spent the week at the quietest guesthouse in the world. I enjoyed being back in the travelers social world. At the hostel there were quite a few of the same people there as before I left for Dali, so it was nice to sit and chat before heading out again on an all day bus adventure.
The next morning I boarded a ten hour bus, I think....to tell you the truth I had heard that it was between 8 and 12 hours... I knew starting this journey that half the stories backpackers have are from transportation. It's about mixing with the locals and living by their rules. Some of the fun things that were included on this jaunt were watching the men across the aisle eat an entire bird, I use the word bird as I don't think it was chicken or duck....or turkey. Another fun one was the boy sitting next to me needing to use the voice recognition to complete every call, mostly when I had drifted off...finally. Also, the bus broke down for an hour, still don't know what exactly they were fixing. Also, the need to stop at an impromptu security check where each of the officiers requested to see my passport and ask questions they didn't understand the answers to....hmph.
We made it to Hekou, China at closer to the 11 hour mark than 10. In Hekou I was told the border would be closed and I would have to find accommodations in the shady border town. However, I lucked out and the border was open. Now I really just traded one crapy border town for another but I was done with China and thought I would take my shot at Vietnam rather than continue one more day in there. Crossing was rather simple but it was obvious that this wasn't the most popular way of coming into Vietnam for foreigners. I stayed the night in a less than awesome hotel and did little more than fall asleep and try to forget that I have one more mini bus ride the following day, which turned out to be painless and I was in Sapa by 3pm that afternoon.
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