At midnight the train reached Chinese customs at Pingxiang, a small town about 10 km from the border. By this time our train was only 3 cars long and held only 25 or 30 people, so I thought the crossing would go quickly. We sat on our bunks, and every 20 minutes a different group of uniformed officers would come through to check our passports. This went on for quite some time.

The officers were all curteous and polite, but none spoke English so we had no idea how long we would be stopped. At one point, a guy looked at our passports, grunted, and then walked off the train with them. We stewed over that grunt the whole time he was gone. Was that a good grunt or a bad grunt? Would we ever see our passports again? Eventually he did return, passports in hand, complete with a new red stamp. We were now officially gone from China, though our train didn't leave until 3:30 a.m.

It was a short half hour to Dong Deng, just over border. Here are train stopped for Vietnamese customs. They shooed us off the train into a very, very cold night. We were at a small French colonial railway station, decaying yellow ochre. A few Vietnamese officials were wandering around the platform, but none of them seemed particularly interested in the fact that a bunch of foriegners had just arrived. The 30 of us passengers just stood there, pulling clothes out of our packs in a feeble attempt to fight off the cold.

Lacking anything better to do, Sarah and I wandered into the station, where we saw a window labled "Customs." Thus began our journey through the wonderfully ineffient world of Vietnamese immigration.

The guy at the customs window gave us a form. Usual questions about name, nationality, visa numbers. No problem. But once we had filled it out, he didn't want it back. Instead, he pointed to another window across the station. At this window they took our forms and passports, looked at them briefly, then very politely said "20 minutes sit please." The officer then placed our passports on a stack, where they sat untouched. After 20 minutes, he picked them off the stack, called us up, gave them a stamp, and handed them back. Now he pointed us back to Form Guy at the first window.

When we got back to Form Guy, he looked genuinely suprised to see us, as if it were really unusual for us to want to do customs and immigration stuff at his customs and immigration window. He took a look at our forms, then pointed us to a place outside the station where 2 guys sat behind big wooden tables. We went out there, hauled our backpacks up onto the tables, sat where they asked us to sit, and prepared ourselves for an exhaustive search of our baggage and bodies. But I guess that shave this morning paid off, because he took one look at my beatific face and said "OK."

We were through.

We grabbed our bags and headed back to the platform, really looking forward to our luxurious warm bunks on the T5. But as we reached the tracks --- horror! -- the T5 was gone. This was not a good thing on a freezing cold morning, at 5 am, when you haven't gotten any sleep.

Our fellow passengers were still trickling into the station to subject themselves to passport control. There was nothing we could do but wait and do jumping jacks to try to stay warm.

Finally, at 6 am, 7 am chinese time, a lady in a uniform montioned that it was time to go. The T5 was still nowhere in sight. Instead, she pointed to a rotting metallic hulk of a train. It looked more like an airstream trailer that had been hit by a train than like a train itself. I held out hope that maybe the T5 was pulled up on a track behind the junk heap, but as we neared the tracked I could see the destination "Hanoi" written on the cars. This was our train.

The inside turned out to be even worse than the outside. The decor was beat up gray plastic and metal. There were bars over the windows to protect them from rock-throwing village boys. The bunks were burgandy vinyl that hadn't been cleaned since the train went into service 30 years ago. The squat toilet was a giant metal bowl set into the floor with 2 narrow, foot-sized pedestals rising out of the middle. They were wet and slippery and with the jostling of the train I think it was only usuable by Cirque du Soliel performers, or others who'd spent years honing their sense of balance.

The worse part, though, was the bunks. Each one held a pillow the size of a Chicklett and a single, neatly folded white sheet. That was it. No comforter, not even a horsehair blanket to fight off the cold. I was wearing shoes, socks, pants, a t-shirt, a long-sleeve t-shirt, a fleece, and a North Face jacket and it still felt colder than an igloo on Mount Ranier. I think the train acted as a sort of giant radiator, pulling heat from our bodies and venting it off into the Vietnamese air.

Someone discovered the car infront of ours was empty, so within minutes the 30 passengers had stripped it clean of its sheets. It was a strange site to see all of us -- Chinese, Vietnamese, Dutch, British, and American -- wrapped from head to toe in white sheets. As we passed villages, people must have caught a glimpse of us through the barred windows and wondered where local authorities had managed to arrest a whole prison train full of such multi-ethnic Klansmen.

Now that I've abandoned any hope of sleep, it's turned out to be a pretty fun ride. We're sharing our cabin with a nice Chinese couple who are smuggling about 40 boxes of merchandise across the border. They've stuffed their entire side of the cabin full from floor to ceiling, leaving just enough room to wedge their butts up on the edge of the lower bunk. We've been joined by a British guy who is escaping the three chain-smokers in his compartment.

When we stop in villages the locals crowd the train windows, selling fruit, eggs, and bread. We've all bought different things and are sharing them in quite an ecclectic buffet: sunflower seeds, Oreos, oranges, nasty fish sausage, and hard boiled eggs "still hot from the chicken's arse," as our British friend so eloquently put it.