After more than a month in China it was finally time to leave and move onto Vietnam, a place that Gemma was especially looking forward to visiting. We'd overstayed our proposed departure date to remain in China for the Spring Festival and now that the festival was over we hoped that booking transport would be far easier.

Yangshou is in the middle of nowhere and has no direct link to Hanoi, our next stop. We looked into the border crossings between China and Vietnam and the easiest looked like the train crossing from Nanning to Hanoi. Nanning is another one of those enormous Chinese cities that we'd never heard of, fortunately for us it is a mere (we genuinely mean this - our perception of long journeys has changed significantly) 3 hour by bus from Yangshou. A quick taxi from the out of town bus station in Nanning and we were at the relatively calm city centre train station. We were in luck, the overnight train to Hanoi was leaving in a few hours at 8pm and we could still buy tickets for the first class sleeper compartment. We jumped at the chance; for once we'd been able to buy train tickets without queuing for hours to find that the next train was days away!

The train was very nice, with some comfortable beds and fine linen, the only problem being that after a couple of hours the train stopped and we were marched out of our compartment with our luggage by Chinese immigration to go through the Chinese exit procedures. That experience was then repeated two hours later when we arrived at the Vietnam border and the Vietnamese authorities carried out their entry procedures. We passed through unhindered as Gemma's hard work in London securing our Vietnamese visas paid dividends. One traveller had not been so lucky and didn't make and was detained by the Chinese immigration officials!

After crossing the border the train continued for another couple of hours before terminating in Hanoi at 4am. We'd been on the "sleeper" train (and in a first class compartment) for a little over six hours and succeeded in getting approximately zero hours sleep. At least we'd arrived and the journey had been short!