We took a 7am bus lasting 8 hours across the pretty hectic border between Vietnam and China, where we handed our passports over into a massive scrum for a good half hour, and spent that time craning our necks to try and keep sight of them.
After the border crossing, we were asked where in Nanning we wanted to get off, so I tried our luck by asking for the airport, seeing as we had an 8.30pm flight to Chengdu. "Airport? Sure!" came the reply, and we dutifully put our bags in the appropriate section of the bus. Two hours later we stopped on the motorway, and the man in charge shouted "Airport!" - so we got off, with about 12 other people - all of whom got into fancy cars awaiting their arrival for transfer to the airport. Hmmm..... Of course, we had not made any such arrangement, so spotted a plane taking off in the distance and walked towards it, along the hard shoulder of the motorway for half an hour - with all our luggage - until we saw the exit for the airport, which we took (see picture of Ben above!). Welome to China, people!
We arrived at about 11pm at the Loft hostel in Chengdu, where we have a room with a shared bathroom for Y100 per night. It is essentially a cell, with hard beds, a stone floor and 'trendy' exposed brickwork walls. The showers have mould on them and the bathrooms are an outside flight of stairs away. I thought we had left discomforts like this behind when we got proper jobs - aparently this trip is not an extended holiday, but back to 'travelling'... *sigh* In any event, we are stuck here for the time being as our Tibet permits are being sent to this address - so we had better get used to it and MTFU (as Rob would say..).
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