Photography 🢒 Southeast Asia 1993
Vietnam was just starting to open up then, although the US hadn't lifted its embargo yet. I wanted to travel overland from Hong Kong to Hanoi, and began planning months in advance. The trip through southern China, to the border crossing at Pingxiang, was uneventful.
This is the only picture I took on that road through China. The border is just down the road, around a couple corners. The train sign was spot-on; they ran actual coal-powered steam trains in this area,
Despite having visas stamped explicitly for land entry, I still got shaken down at the Vietnamese border. Travel on the Vietnamese side of the border proved much harder than in China. A bus into Hanoi travelled so slowly and broke down so often that I began to give serious thought to travelling by bicycle in future.
