Night bus

Well, been there done that - a cheap Vietnamese night sleeper bus. And, oh happy day, I get to be there and do it again next night as well!

Vietnam is the size of Finland, but stretched out even narrower and longer - and within the 15 days of free entry into the country that I have, I'm pretty much travelling through the whole length of it. The options are flying (decadent, more expensive, ecologically bad), taking the night train (nearly as expensive as flying) or the so called Open Tour night buses, which cost next to nothing and take you from one city to the next overnight and allow you to spend the full daylight hours in one city before picking you up again to take you on to the next. Which sounds like a good system on the face of it.

In the buses, two layers or tourists are neatly slotted into plastic compartments with seat backs that go nearly all the way down. And under the reclined seat of the person in front, you should try to fit a lot of leg into a little space. Unnecessary arm rests etc are further strategically placed to make sleeping on your side as difficult as possible. The leg room was almost, but not quite long enough for me. And what really got to me as the night drew on was, that as the space gradually sloped downwards, it was extremely low at the end. The only way to stretch out my legs was to assume a ballerina-style extended plie.

I suppose I could have fallen asleep anyway, but then we come to the second issue: that of gentle nightly noises. Namely the blaring of the horn. At regular intervals, usually around every 20 seconds, the driver would lean of the horn and keep leaning for seconds on end. In this country of scooters, the accepted way for bigger vehicles to announce; "here I come, get out of my face" is to blow their horns. And if a scooter is slow to respond to the first machine gun fire of little horn blows, then just lean on the horn until he does. Unfortunately my bunk was in the second row from the front - much too close to the horn for me to even try to fool myself I couldn't hear it - especially since the sound seemed to reverberate in the structures of the bunk. Strike three was the fact that the driver played music low to keep alert through his night shift. Played music low by local standards that is! By our standards he had set up his own karaoke bar and even through earplugs I had no problem making out every cursed word of every cursed song.

So today I get to spend a full day in Nha Trang - wandering around the city sleepless and unwashed, wondering why the banana flies seem to prefer me to the fruit, waiting for the next bus at 6p.m. to take me on to Hoi An, where I will certainly stay for a few days at least. And I may consider taking those expensive night trains next time! Or maybe one of these Bat Mobile?