Vietnam!

We made it to Vietnam this morning, which means I can access my blog again! We had an amazing time in China and are looking forward to our next adventure in Vietnam.  So far my big downer of the last week is that my feet and ankles are covered in bug bites! They are driving me nuts :( Here's what happened on our trip from China to Vietnam.

Oct 10 - Nanning, China to Hanoi, Vietnam

We boarded a train this morning from Guilin to Nanning.  It was about a 5hr train ride.  Pretty uneventful.  We arrived in Nanning and looked into buying our train tickets to Hanoi.  Before buying our tickets we had to find a bank as we were about $20 short for the train.  we tried a couple of bank machines but they weren't "Plus" machines so our cards didn't work.  We had a bit of a walk with our bags and the sweltering heat but we found a bank and were able to buy our tickets.  We had to kill about 4 hrs in the train station which sucked but it passed fairly quickly.  The train left at about 6:45pm and was scheduled to arrive in Hanoi at 4:45am.  We didn't get much sleep since we had to go through Chinese customs around 11pm and then Vietnamese customs around 12am.  So we had about 4 hrs of sleep.  We arrived in Hanoi and a Chinese guy Beau had been talking to tried to help us get a cab.  Of course since it was crazy early they were charging a fortune.  They wanted to charge us 200,000VND ($10) to go about 4kms.  We got them down to 80K and had them drop us off at a random hostel we picked.  Which turned out to be closed for the night, some Vietnamese guy tried to get us to go with him to a hotel but as we were walking we found another hostel that was in the guide book so we opted for that one.  We had to wait about an hour to be allowed to check in but once we did the rooms were neat and clean so we went to bed for a bit.