Entering Viet Nam

Debra and I took a sleeper bus for the twelve hour ride from Kunming to Hekou. Hekou is the town in China that we were to cross the border at. The bus is the only means of transport into this town as the railroad tracks were destroyed in a mudslide several years ago and have never been repaired.

The sleeper bus is just that. It is a bus that has no seats. Instead it has rows of narrow bunks. They are double stack and there is a row along each side and a row down the center.

I did not sleep well on it. First, the, mentioned, encounter was unpleasant. Second, it just wasn't a place that I was ready to sleep well. However, the first part of the ride was uneventful. It was raining and the roads were slick but the roads were pretty empty. Then, about four a.m. the bus left the highway and continued down a dirt road for the rest of the journey. At about five we crossed to within fifty kilometers of the China – Viet Nam border and a soldier entered the bus and took all of our passports and logged our entry into a border area. The bus then continued, on the wet dirt roads, the rest of the way.

When we arrived in Hekou we saw that there really was nothing to mention in this town. From the bus station (which is a muddy field, with a couple of offices, encircled by a brick wall) we walked to the border station. It was about two or three blocks and there was very little traffic at the border station other than heavy carts filled with goods being pushed through the 300m zone between the stations on each side.

The goods were offloaded from a truck on one side and placed on very large carts, about 2m x 5m and then pushed and pulled by large groups of up to twenty workers, depending what was on the cart, to trucks on the other side and then reloaded. This allowed the transfer of goods between the two sides with no travel of motor vehicles between the two countries.

Debra and I entered on the Chinese side and completed our paperwork, there were only two forms and they were quite simple, examples were on the wall for those who were unable to read the Chinese and most of the questions were in both Chinese and English.

Our bags were x-rayed and we walked through the open space between the two stations. On the Viet Namese side the process was similar to what we had just done. I would estimate that the entire process took only about a half hour.