Daylight broke as I sat in the little restaurant in Lao Cai. I was worried I might need some of the very little cash that I had saved from Hanoi - it is impossible to trade back Vietnamese Dong, so it is difficult to budget down to the last thousand dong when leaving.....19,500 dong = 1 dollar.

The restaurant was charging exorbitant prices - even had their prices in US dollars!!! They wanted $1.50 for an omelet - crazy expensive in these here parts!!!! Instead I used most of my last remaining cash to buy a lemon tea and a cool knife from a street seller - good for mangoes and stabbing......I had read this was one of the toughest routes - Hekou to Kunming for pickpockets and petty crime..... a girl has to protect her mangoes after all!!!!!!

I knew that China was one hour difference but couldn't remember which way and the nice restaurant owner seemed to understand my question.....it was 6 am in Vietnam and she told me it was 7:30 am in China......hmmm, little suspicious on that extra half hour but it could be like Newfoundland.......so I asked her if she would drive me on her bike to the border. All these conversations were in mime, of which I am fluent. She said no but she had a friend.....always a friend....

Not wanting to be late for the 7 am opening of the Chinese border, I packed my new shiv and hopped on the back of yet another bike for the unknown distance to the border. Turns out it was about a 10 minute ride through a really new part of town. Buddy dropped my bags and me off in the midst of a quickly developing crowd. The only problem was the crowd was forming away from where the Entry/Exit Building was. I scanned the crowd for a western face - maybe one with a Lonely Planet......nada. Not one westerner. Second best I saw a rich, birdwatcher kind of Tilley wearing, Asian guy and asked him if he spoke English. Yup, he did and he had no idea why everyone was where they were either. He also told me we had about one hour to wait and where he had traded his last Dong - pointing to an elderly money trader sitting amidst a gaggle of other money traders. Being a complete Ding Dong, I traded my last precious Dong for some Chinese Yuan ( I had earlier found a money trader in Hanoi, down some back alley that a girl in a jewelry store told me about). See, you cannot legally buy Chinese Currency in Vietnam. I had no idea what was on the other side and if I was lucky enough to grab a bus right away - I would need cash in hand.




My Dong got me about $6 in Yuan and I felt good until......I realized I had one hour to wait and I was very hungry and there were lots of good stuff being sold by the street sellers at the border. As I realized my stupidity - maybe I would cross and grab the first bus and be on it for 12 hours and have not had anything to eat........yikes, that would be very bad - how would I have enough energy to stab a would-be thief and what if I was in detention for hours or years, still with no nutrition........ OK, when you have just spent two nights on a train and are now at the border of one of the largest countries in the world, with one of the worst human rights records, your mind starts to wander.......

I scanned the growing crowd - mostly hundreds of migrant workers on bicycles, loaded down with vegetables and lots of boxes, motor bikes piled high with every possible item, some horse and buggies and lots of poor looking folks looking very cold. And then I saw the only two other white faces - a couple with huge packs, leaning against the fence, taking it all in. They looked nice. I approached and asked if they had figured out the queuing. Nope. Rachel and Nick from Brisbane Australia. They went and bought breakfast. I looked longingly at Rachel's baguette before explaining how Dongless I was. I remembered I had cheddar in my bag that I had bought in DaNang. Good cheese is a very rare thing in Asia - (Laughing Cow processed cheese is the only cheese one normally sees and it can withstand years of 40 degree heat and not even emulsify....hmmmm, maybe not real cheese at all???? Who's really laughing?) I offered to trade some Cheddar for a Baguette....done! Rachel and I both became very happy campers - she thoroughly enjoying her first sharp aged cheddar in months, me - happy to share. Excellent trade.

Nick and Rachel had been in China for a few weeks earlier: Rachel had studied International Business and had taken three years of Mandarin at university: they had become embittered with Chinese travel and had worked there way into Vietnam and Laos for a while and were now ready to embrace the Chinese challenge once more. Perfect for me - nice folks to tag along with, and one with some Mandarin....I didn't even know how much that would be needed at this point!



A lineup started to form at the Exit.....yeah, go figure, so we joined in. The Vietnamese immigration building is new and spacious and very nice. We lined up in the foreigners line with the Japanese birdwatching rich guy group......they were really funny refusing to let any Chinese push past them......Chinese push to the front of any line - whether it is for them or not - it is just nature. So we had our bags scanned and rescanned and through we were. Very easy and efficient. The three Japanese and the three of us were the only foreigners there! The Japanese guys were headed to the rice terraces for photography. Go figure!



As we excited the building we could see Hekou China beckoning...a huge Chinese arch and a new high rise to top the one on the Vietnamese side was under construction. Everything, other than the hundreds of migrant workers lined up with their bicycles and produce, looked shiny and new. Not the wild west border town I had expected. Not like Laos or Cambodia, more like Niagara Falls border crossing, except without the partially open malls and the run down feel: this was a booming city,





We walked into the Chinese Immigration Building and were met with big smiles and happy happy folks. One official woman approached me and became my own border aide. She took me to the forms I needed to fill out (medical questionnaire) and then to the place for bag screening and then to have my temperature taken. I looked at the computer screen and there was a long shot of everyone in the large open immigration hall, with a little red blinking number floating over each head. That was each person's temperature. Somehow they had pretty powerful sensors to pick those up.....welcome to China - we can see inside your brain....we will start with your temperature.....
Everyone was so darn nice it was rather alarming if I hadn't read about it on everyone else's blogs.

After a few minutes, the three of us popped out of the building and we were in China.