Crowded streets, closed supermarkets, long queues everywhere: National Holidays in China. One way to get out of it is to travel to one of the awesome countries around China.
Last week I went to Vietnam with 30 other people and a Chinese not English-speaking travel guide. Now I never want to hear something like ‘Organized Traveling is boring’ anymore.

The trip started at Saturday night, in a sleeping bus, which drove us directly to DongXing. After walking behind the tour guide for about one hour, without any idea of why walking behind the not English-speaking tour guide, we crossed the border by foot.

Till then the Chinese travelling started: we jumped into a bus and sat there for hours, taking pictures out of the window until we arrived in HaLong, a wonderful coastal city. Everything seemed to be relaxing so far: sitting at the beach, drinking beer on the streets and enjoy the atmosphere in Vietnam.

But then the next morning came: bus, bus, bus, bus, picture break, bus, bus, bus, buy some Vietnamese outfits (just the foreigners of our lovely group) and then an awesome boat trip in LongWan.

After some more hours sitting in the bus, and a really great night in Hanoi we spend one more day in the bus to get back to HaLong, to make a boat trip which reminds everybody a little bit too much at the bus (which seemed to be understandable- all the Chinese people were sitting inside, looking out of the window instead of enjoying the air at the awesome sundeck).

A few hours in the bus later we jumped out of the bus and ran after all the Chinese people and our travel guide because the Vietnamese-Chinese border was closing.

That was an exciting trip and the best possibility to learn something about the Chinese Culture without being in China.