Which is how we found ourselves tickets on the Vietnamese Sleeper Bus, a delightful coach service that takes you anywhere in the country--from top to tail--Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh, around and beyond. Our particular voyage took us from Hoi An to Nha Trang, an 11-hour-trip from ancient trading town to Russian-touristy beach town, only we didn't know this yet.
The journey started less than auspiciously when a man on a motorbike arrived to pick up Paul, the luggage and me. Let me rephrase--very small motorbike. He pointed (the man, not the bike): 'Who goes first?' Smartly, I argued: 'we booked the coach!' Smartly, he responded: 'I take you to coach'.
It appeared the coach was remotely parked on a much larger road than our little backwater street. So I hopped on, hugged tightly a man whose name I never found out and prayed the rucksack strapped to my back wouldn't propel me backwards.
Upon arrival, we were shuttled to two seats stacked on the 'upstairs' of the bus all the way to the back. The sleeper bus is dubbed a 'sleeper' because it contains seats that, loosely, recline. They come decked with a footwell and a dodgy set of pillows and blankets that may or may not have been washed in the last three years.
If you're short, which Paul and I are, it's okay. If you're not, like our Flasheart-lengthed new bus friend from South England, you're pretty much 'sleeping' (another term I use loosely) accordion fashion.
tall people problems
Paul's seat was directly behind me and directly next to the toilet. The door didn't close or lock, people tended to pee on the seat, floor, sink and by 30 minutes into the trip, Paul became the official spokesman of the 'is there anyone in the bathroom?' game. Only he didn't speak Vietnamese so it became a pantomime of pissing.
Upon departure, our bus was relatively empty. So we tried to move downstairs to two seats next to one another. A screaming match ensued with the 22-year-old bus conductor who, in a moment of we-don't-speak-the-same-language-crisis shouted 'NO!' emphatically. Multiple times. We got the point.
As it turned out, we stopped several times, often at the side of the road, to pick up an array of passengers, a mix of locals and western tourists. As the conductor tucked us in like sardines, the locals comfied up and passed out straight away. This was no small feat considering the lethal combination of meticulously potholed pavement and our bus driver's desire to reach our destination dead or alive.
On top of this, I'd been having a bit of a crisis of confidence. The second week of the trip was marred with my obsessive notion that I had a blood clot in my leg, that it was going to travel to my brain and I was going to die in the middle of some Vietnamese b-road. This wasn't entirely unfounded--since my brother's stroke I'd been meaning to get tested to see if I had the same blood disorder. Plus, I'd done a lot of traveling already throughout the summer and woke up the morning after my flight home from Ghana seized with pain and unable to stand up. Naturally, being the needle-phobic-hypochondriac I am, I diagnosed myself with DVT and then did absolutely nothing about it.
Four hours in and I was in panic mode. Between fighting the toilet pirates and trying not to fall off the top bunk between potholes, Paul fed me a steady stream of Oreos. Because somehow, this was going to sustain my well-being against life-threatening health issues. It appeared to work because I survived the journey and am still alive to tell the tale.
The rest of the trip was much of a muchness. Fall asleep, be jolted awake by pothole at 50-miles-per-hour, fall asleep, have a chat with the lovely English couple next to us, dive into pothole the size of a car, hit our heads on the window, sleep--possibly concussion induced. This routine was briefly punctuated by a rest stop somewhere in the middle of a forest. It catered to finer palates with various types of scorpion or snake whiskey, noodles that had been sitting for far too long and these local delights:
Seaweed Pringles just about made the trip bearable and we arrived into Nha Trang as the sun was rising at 6am. We trudged our way to our hotel, obviously located at the opposite side of the city, and dropped our bags as the hotel was setting up their gigantic free breakfast. What a sight for hungry, smelly, exhausted eyes.
The check-in staff eyed us warily and consented to accept our luggage. They promptly reminded us that check-in was at 2pm, that our room wouldn't be ready until then and that no we could not have breakfast but yes we could use the complimentary beach chairs and towels on the beach.
Paul and I made our way to find a group of heavyset, middle aged Russians vying for every single beach chair. Germans usually hold the hogging the beach chairs record but these Russians gave them a run for their money. At 7am, all but two chairs were taken. We staked our claim, passed out facedown and woke up 3 hours later stuck to the plastic mats.
4 hours to go.
At this point, I realised that if we'd have flown, we may have been out of pocket £60 more than the bus. But isn't a night's sleep worth that? At least?
Yes. Yes it is.
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