Getting to Vietnam...by land

It took a lot longer than I thought to figure out how to get to Vietnam, or well to where we wanted to go. First, we had to go to Guangzhou because there weren't any trains to Nanning 南宁, the border town in China where we could take a train to Vietnam. So we hung around in Guangzhou for a day with Nathan, a friend who worked in Fuyang for a bit. Guangzhou (广州) is the capital of Guangdong province (广东), canton region, in the southeastern corner of China next to Hong Kong. Unfortunately, there wasn't much to do in the city, even Nathan who's lived there for a few years couldn't come up with anything better than eating dim sum for the day.


Anyways, Guangzhou is a pretty city just to walk around. They really value their trees there and so you can see places where they just built walls and sidewalks around the old trees. Canton Tower is the tallest building in Guangzhou and I think it looks like it's wrapped with the fruit protectors.
From Guangzhou we got an overnight train to Nanning and then another over night train to Hanoi. So we had a day in Nanning and just wandered around a little and found a half finished park to hang around in for the day.




The overnight train across the border into Vietnam was really tiny. There were only about 40 passengers on the train, and probably half as many crew. All the cars were first class sleeping cars (so nice!). It was also a bit funny cause we were in a cabin with another American and a Mongolian guy who couldn't speak Chinese, but when we had to get off the train to get our passports stamped the crew came in and tried to speak to the Mongolian guy so I had to translate for him.
We got into Hanoi at around 5am and didn't know where to go and had no money. And since we didn't want to get ripped off by the taxi drivers we walked the 4km into Hanoi, asking people along the way how to get there. We crossed a nice long bridge just before the sky got light and got into the old town of Hanoi just in time to eat our first morning Pho. It was better than I even imagined.
Then off to Halong Bay. We planned to go out to Cat Ba island, where there's supposed to be good rock climbing, but we didn't check the weather before we packed our climbing gear. It was so cold and cloudy in Halong Bay, and they said it was going to rain for the next week. So we only stayed for one night.