You might think about using some sort of tunnel between the two, (GRE or IPSEC) which would "hide" almost all the hops, and should get around the 30-hop issue.You'll need hardware at both ends able to do it, which almost every Cisco router made will ...
I've run into the same issue. VRF-"lite" is really MPLS-99%, IE all features work, MP-BGP peer sessions, routes in VRF's etc, just no tag-switching on the interfaces.One of the suggestions the TAC offered was to use some form of encapsulation (frame-...