People i met here, who contributed to and improved my trip: Juliana (Russia)
We spent most of the day lazing around our hostel in Guilin and on the train to Nanning. The highlight of this journey was a woman who had several live chickens in a box on the luggage rack and a bag of live fish on her lap! We arrived into Nanning pretty late, booked our onward tickets to Pingxiang on the China/Vietnam border for the following morning and got an early night.
We woke early to catch the 8am train from Nanning to Pingxiang and fully expected it to be a trying day, as most border crossings are. When we arrived into Pingxiang around 11.30, we met an American couple called Tal and Mandy and agreed to share the hassles together. We were quite surprised when we met 2 tuk tuk drivers prepared to take us the 17km to the border for only 10Y per tuk tuk. We jumped in and told him to stop at the bank on the way to the border. 2 minutes later he pulled up to a bank who wouldn't change currency, which he obviously knew, but said he was more than happy to change it with us. In all fairness he gave us a decent exchange rate, so we agreed. To our surprise, once the money had changed hands, he informed us there was no way he could take us for 10Y as it was too far. Having just changed all but 10Y of our money, we were forced to flag another tuk tuk down and change some more dollars to pay what became a 20Y fare! A bit of a sad note to leave the country on, but all in all, it had been a wonderful 2 months with many fond memories and few scams like this occurring.
