the bumbling bureaucracy of border officials....

Hello folks. I'm in china now - Harbin to be exact. It's very wet here, and the city seems to be slowly flooding. I have no desire to stay here in the slightest, so as soon as I arrived I procured an onward ticket to beijing (it was really expensive but it was that or wait for three days!) which still leaves me 10 hours to have a good look around. My plan for the near future sees me in Beijing just as long as it takes me to get a train direct to Kunming, where I shall wait out the rest of my time in China until I (hopefully) get a boat to Japan from Shanghai.

The train here from Vladivostok was long and arduous, and not without incident - far removed from the unfortunate events of my last journey, however, the follys concerned were entirely the fault of my own silliness. To begin with I had to hand over quite a sizeable sum of money to the boorish guards on the Russian side of the border, having failed to register my visa during my stay in Vladivostok - You see, though the country is more open than ever in terms of travelling, to be in Russia you still need to get your visa stamped every time you stay in a new city for any length of time. Of course, I thought that I only needed the one stamp (which I got in Moscow) but no - that only covered me for the first 4 days here. I do admit to having a sneaking suspicision that I needed further stamps, but because I spent so many hours in a police station when I first got to Vladivostok, I didn't have the energy to seek out the bent tourist police. Plus I didn't want to have to tell them where I was staying - I'm not familiar with the laws for Russians regarding keeping foriegners, and didn't want to risk getting the family I stayed with in any trouble.

Still, I spent another few hours in another police station, losing another wad of cash in the process. And I would just like to take this opportunity to bad mouth border officials the world over: Despite their lowly position occupying the prickly fringes of officialdom they weild an unfortunate amount of power that leaves the humble traveller (me) entirely at their mercy. The fanatical airs they assume ensure that passage from one region to another is as painful and trying as humanly possible, and the responsibility they so self-importantly flaunt is by no means matched to their somewhat inferior intellect. By having the Belarus transit visa (which I was required to get before taking a train to Moscow) in my passport, confusion at each stage of immigration was at a fever pitch - He has two visa's! Why do you have this visa?! Where exactly do you intend to travel? (The answer to that last question I thought was fairly obvious) After much ado and superfluous tapping on keyboards I was finally free to continue my journey, no thanks to the bumbling bureaucracy of border officials.

For years this border post has been open, and has grown into an important vein of trade between the two countries. You'd be forgiven in thinking that the proceedings involved would have been smoothed out over time, and the whole affair of exiting or entering pass without too much trouble. But no. A five hour wait seems to be mandatory for everyone - the bloody checkpoint doesn't even open until three hours after you arrive!

It is not fair, of course, to say that this is typical of every checkpoint the world over. Entering China involved a lot less hassle - the border guards here came onto the train, checked visa's and passports and left with minimal fuss. The only trouble I had at this juncture was my failure to complete a statement of health properly - I don't take responsibility for this however, seeing as it was only in Chinese and Russian, and I had to guess what the questions were asking! It was like a bad exam - I entered my details, handed it to the official, she looked at it, said No, handed it back, and I tried again until I got things perfect.
No evident hassle at the Chinese border, but it was a little annoying waiting in the smoggy town of Suifenhe for nearly six hours while they changed the wheels to match the Chinese gradient. I was free to wander around though, and as soon as I left the station was greeted by the old familiar stink, that same choking fragrance of soot and exhaust fumes I've come to expect of dear old China. It's good to be back.