Visas and crossing borders

Women doing traditional dance in a park of Nanning.

From Hanoi I took the train to China. Terminus: the city of Nanning.

Before I explain how I crossed the border, I need to explain how I got my visas. From the very beginning I knew that the visas would be some of the biggest challenges. I explain in my first post that the main obstacles on my road would be :
  • Finding a boat to cross from New Zealand to Australia.
  • Finding a boat to cross from Australia to Indonesia.
  • Obtaining a Chinese visa
  • Obtaining a Russian visa
I already gave up on the two first points and flew instead of using boats. It didn't change my itinerary and saved me a lot of money and time. But not obtaining the visas would have been a big issue, forcing me to cut a large chunk of my route or taking another path to Europe. I knew I could make the Chinese visa in Hanoi easily, but the Russian one was another story. If you apply for the Russian visa, you need to do it from your home country. That means I need to go to the Russian embassy in Bern to do it. I couldn't do the visa before starting my trip, because the visa is valid only for three months. I reached Russia only seven months after I left Switzerland. That left me with only one option.
What I did was send my Swiss passport in Switzerland to the agency Consular Service Fly GmbH. I sent it as soon as I entered Vietnam. That left a bit less than one month to do the visas and send back the passport in Hanoi. Since the agency was going to make my Russian visa, I asked them to also do the Chinese and Mongolian at the same time. Of course we prepared together months in advance. I had sent them all the documents and forms before sending my passport, so that they could make the visas rapidly.
During the time I didn't have my Swiss passport, I was using my Japanese one instead. There was two major risks to this plan. First my Japanese passport didn't have the Vietnamese visa. If some official discovered the fact I would have been in trouble, possibly deported to Japan. Second, my passport would have to travel a long way by post and there is always the chance that it end up lost. The lady of DHL in Ho Chi Minh city warned me several times that they would not take responsibility if it got lost.

In the end, I received my Swiss passport back at my Hostel in Hanoi with all three visas inside. A big thanks to the team of Consular Service who made this possible even with the crazy time constrain.

The train to China departed from the Gia Lam station in Hanoi. It's a small station and my taxi driver didn't know where it was. It took us a bit of time to figure out how to get there. The train was supposed to leave at 21:20, but it started moving at 21:00. I don't know if it's normal, but, like me, get there in advance if you take this train. We arrived at the border at 1:00 in the middle of the night and had to get out of the train with all our luggage. We passed the Vietnamese check-point and boarded the train again at 1:30. At 3:30 we had to wake up again and get out with all our luggage, again. We passed the Chinese check-point, then went back in the train. I don't know why it took 2 hours for the train to pass the border. It was less than 10 km of distance. No need to say I didn't sleep much.
The train costed 285 CNY.
Finally the train arrived at 9:20 in Nanning, but I wasn't at the end of my journey. The hostel I booked on Hostelworld wasn't easy to find. It was located inside a huge apartment complex. The place looked in a sorry state. When I rang at the door nobody came. Maybe they had a lunch break, I though. After more than an hour of waiting. I found somebody who lent me their phone so that I could call the hostel. The person I spook to could barely speak English, so she gave the phone to a guest of the hostel who could speak English. He explained that the hostel has two locations and the one in Hostelworld had been closed. He told me how to get to the second location and met me at the subway station to guide me. It was a long day.

Train from Hanoi to Nanning. Very comfortable cabin of 4 beds.


Nanning. A pleasant, but generic Chinese city. It has nearly no touristic attractions. Everything has been rebuild anew, making it bland like many provincial capitals in China. It was a fine place to relax for a day.


The guy who was staying in the hostel in Nanning and helped me find my way to the new location of the hostel. Seen here making a silly face :) He was a fitness maniac. I ended up exercising with him and the other guests.

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