Ready to go !

We have the visas;

Those were not easy to get. To show ourselves worthy we had to prove why we were in Vietnam we had to show plane reservations, hotel tickets, references from my employer...

And the train tickets to China :

In Russian, Vietnamese and Chinese. The price is defined in Swiss Francs, a small country at the other end of the continent... According to the posters, the Hanoi-Beijing is planned for easy train change to Moscow. Forty years ago, train was the usual means of transportation for Vietnamese students going to study in Eastern Europe...

  

We leave on January 1st, the day I reach 31. The train stops in Nanning, small town with only a few millions inhabitants, in the south of China ; we'll try to go on, on the same day, to Guilin where the landscape is supposed to be pretty. That's if we can manage the Chinese train ticket sellers, harder to deal with than the Vietnamese. 

On the road ! Arrival foreseen at the end of March, but you never know, when all these trains are blocked by the snow.