Crossing the Vietnam-China Border on Foot into China 2023
After receiving our Chinese visas, we took a day to recuperate, caught a ride on a van from Hanoi up to the border city Đồng Đăng, stayed the night, then went to the border the next day.
Why we crossed by foot
You are under no circumstances allowed to cross into China in your own vehicle unless it was purchased in China. Flying may have made it possible to go directly to a more appealing and popular destination, but our intention of going to China was always, always to go to every region China had to offer and a large part of that is not skipping out on the things in between.
Process
Crossing the land border was a lot more simple and straightforward than one might expect. We took a taxi to the border, where someone makes you pay something like 50 cents to take one of those tourist golf carts that litter Vietnamese resort towns to the office.
Arriving at the exit border out of Vietnam, the person checking our passports made us sit down and wait for a few minutes while they made sure it was okay to let us through, presumably because no foreigners really ever cross over the land border. They will give you an exit stamp that has the figure of a car despite being on foot; this may come up in conversation in China when you check in to hotels, as many hotels have a semi-rigorous foreigner check-in process.
In between the two borders is the Friendship Pass (友谊关 in Chinese, Hữu Nghị Quan in Vietnamese) which is featured as the display image for this post. There is a large, empty duty-free mall nearby that I assume was supposed to be more grand of a project that anticipated greater foot traffic and was abandoned. This can be seen in many instances across China for a myriad of reasons, which I talk more about here. <LINK> <BUILDING PHOTO COMPILATION>
Once you get to the Chinese entry border, they make you fill out a semi-pointless immigration health form which seems to be a relic of COVID. You have to either scan a QR code to access it or download the Chinese immigration app. Do not download the app it is absolute garbage. Instead, make sure you have a working WeChat app and an active, verified account. There is the option to scan a WeChat-specific QR code and open the immigration form portal through WeChat and for some reason, China lives, breathes, and eats WeChat-hosted sites. You can read more about it here.
You must make sure that prior to entry, you have a working way to access internet sources you may not be able to typically access in China. Google, my lifeline and old friend in the vast majority of the world, is inaccessible in China, presumably because Google sells your information quite readily and cooperates with the government, unlike Apple, which is accessible in China. I highly prefer Google Maps and Translate, but Apple Maps can suffice. Apple Translate is pretty trash usability-wise and I don’t like Papago, another popular translate app that does function in China, so I opt for Google. When accessing a China-only site, sometimes you can end up going through the tedious process of taking a screenshot, turning on the V*N, translating something in the Google Translate app, turning off the V*N to continue to use the Chinese site, and repeating that until you get to where you need to be. I talk more about important apps, sites, and internet resources here.
Once you complete the form, you pass through the gate with a generated QR code and get to a pretty typical immigration process where they scan your bags, ask you questions about your travel purposes, and take great interest in your American-ness.
We took a taxi to the train station after getting approached by a driver and being named a semi-fair price. We caught the very last train (that we bought tickets for in advance) and got to Nanning, our first real stop. Train information can be accessed here!