We headed back to Kunming for one night and then took the bus to the border with Vietnam.

The bus journey was pretty horrible, at one point we were stuck in a hotel lobby for 3 hours after the bus broke down. I’m not sure what the problem was but they got it running eventually. We made it to Hekou at just coming up to midnight. the next trick was to find a hotel that wasn’t crawling with prostitutes. The next morning we got up, grabbed some breakfast and then headed across the bridge that separates China and Vietnam.

Once on the other side in a town called Lao Cai we grabbed a minibus up into the hills to Sapa.