A haphazard chronicle of my inevitable misadventures during a year in Vietnam and points east.

p.s. I'll be pitifully grateful if you send me email during my exile: TravelerKaty@hotmail.com

October 2002 November 2002 December 2002 January 2003 February 2003 March 2003 April 2003 May 2003 June 2003 July 2003 August 2003 September 2003 October 2003 November 2003 February 2006 March 2006 May 2006

 
Don Det, Laos to Hoi An, Vietnam

I swore to myself that I would never again write an essay about a horrible bus ride, but holy mother of mercy was my journey from Laos to Vietnam an unmitigated horror.

It didn't help that I'd already been travelling all day when I boarded Satan's Overnight Express to Hell. I had left my lovely Don Det bungalow at 6:30 that morning and after 11 1/2 hours of boat, truck, tuk tuk, and local bus I arrived in Savannakhet hoping for a good night's sleep and an early cross-border bus in the morning. According to my guidebook this plan should have worked perfectly. According to the bus station officials, all of whom oddly possessed a "lazy eye", there was only one bus a day and it left at 8:00 pm.

So I had a choice of catching another bus in two hours or spending an additional 26 hours in Laos. I like Savannakhet, but according to the only other westerner in the bus station it had been steadily raining for three days there, which didn't sound like an enticing way to spend a day. I dug into my bag for my night bus essentials (inflatable pillow, sarong to be used as blanket in aircon buses, earplugs to protect from hideous Lao music, and melatonin tablets) and sat back to wait.

I have had good luck with night buses during my travels through Asia. I've often managed to get two seats to myself (by spreading myself and belongings out and emitting a hostile, antisocial vibe to all boarding passengers) and even in Laos and Myanmar I've usually had reclining seats. Sadly, this was a Vietnamese bus.

It may sound odd after my many months in the country, but I've never actually been on a Vietnamese public bus. Clever entrepreneurs years ago realized that Vietnamese buses are superlatively uncomfortable and slow, with overcrowding and farm animals and breakdowns and seats sized for the comfort of 12 year old children (or Vietnamese people). These farsighted businessmen bought some tolerable buses (not good, mind you, but clean, less than 20 years old and with a smidge more leg room) and started running them between all the major tourist destinations and most of the minor ones. As a result it's extremely rare to see a foreigner on a local bus. This is good in some ways -- at least you have a marginally comfortable ride -- but it does tend to isolate travellers from average Vietnamese people. A tourist here for just 2 weeks or a month may never meet a local person not involved in the tourist industry in some way, whether it is a guide or hotel worker or a kid selling tiger balm and lighters on the street.

The upshot of all this is that you have to be one unlucky slob to find yourself on a Vietnamese non-tourist bus, and I am that slob. When I first took a gander at the vehicle which was to be my home for 20 hours, I very nearly asked for my $10.50 back. No wonder the fare was so cheap. When we were finally allowed to board 2 1/2 hours later than advertised, we found not so much a bus as a large windowed cargo hold. Sure it had seats, but they were the narrowest immovable plastic-covered bench seats I've ever seen on long-distance transportation, maybe 3 1/2 feet wide for two people. The reason for this was the enlarged aisle, which presumably was designed to provide easier loading and unloading, but which effectively served to double the amount of storage space. The back quarter of the bus was piled with the personal possessions of the passengers (many of whom were Vietnamese store owners stocking up on cheap Lao merchandise) along with the paid cargo. The overhead shelf along the length of the bus contained hundreds of cans of baby formula, and goods were stowed under every seat, on the roof, in the hold beneath the bus, and in the crevices around the engine in back.

You're not to assume that because we had so much cargo they would correspondingly reduce the number of passengers. In fact they oversold the available seats, so after they escorted me and a 6'3" German to our seat at the back, a typically Vietnamese rock-concert-general-admission style melee ensued while each ticket holder fought to secure an actual seat. Clearly the bus conductor was aware that foreigners would inevitably come out the losers in this sort of competition. We're too polite, are unwilling to use our elbows, and the Vietnamese are quick and crafty and very, very determined.

As it happens, we may have been better off without a seat. While the German and I attempted to wedge our sizable selves into 3 1/2 feet of colossal discomfort, the losers in the Great Seat Race were busily rearranging the cargo to find the soft stuff -- bags of towels, toilet paper rolls, blankets, and foreigner backpacks -- to make the aisle into one long mattress upon which they could stretch out full length.

Meanwhile, the German and I struggled to get two minutes sleep at one time, sitting upright, practically on top of eachother, and violently jarred each time the bus (which unsurprisingly had very poor shock absorption) went over a rut. Did I mention that the Lao road was under construction, and therefore wasn't paved or even graded for mile after interminably painful mile?

These weren't the only annoyances along the way, of course. One odd practice of the aisle dwellers was that during each of our breaks, they would move undesirable cargo into the space that our feet and legs were supposed to occupy. Sometimes the item moved into our territory would just be a pointy cornered box (not comfortable to lie upon) but on one memorable occasion I picked up a bag containing a 3-foot long live lizard. Alarming, to say the least. Thank God I didn't find out until morning that those four plastic garbage cans lashed directly behind our seat were filled with water snakes, only one of which (to my knowledge) escaped.

The final annoyance of this journey was the sheer unneccessary length of it all. The distance covered was about 375 miles, which we accomplished in 20 hours for an average speed of 19 miles an hour. You may wonder how it is even possible to go that slow in a motorized vehicle. The answer is that we weren't in motion often enough -- when you spend seven full hours at the border it tends to affect your ETA. It seems that because we were carrying so much potentially dutiable cargo, we needed to get to the border early enough to secure a good place in line. Hence the 10:30 p.m. departure. We arrived at the Lao/Vietnam border at 3:30 a.m. despite a lengthy stop to watch David Beckham and Real Madrid eke out a tie in the final minutes with Villareal. The border opened at 7:00 am and though the passengers made it through in an hour, the bus itself enjoyed three hours worth of customs investigation and paperwork.

The rest of the trip was smooth sailing, or as smooth as the sailing can be on a bad Vietnamese mountain road in the back of an ancient torture chamber of a bus. I eventually made it to Hoi An, my final destination, at 7:30 pm, 37 hours after leaving my lovely bungalow with such high hopes of a comfortable journey. I will never learn.

Copyright 2003 Katy Warren


posted by Katy at 1:53 AM