Party Bus

  Buon Ma Thuot, Vietnam
Monday, November 17, 2008

After three days clinging to the back of a motorbike, I was looking forward to the nine hour bus journey to Dalat, just to lay back & relax, so was very pleased when we pulled out of the bus station & I was the only passenger. Mr T had bought my ticket & put me on the correct bus, as no one in Pleiku spoke English & told me the conductor would make sure I got the right connection at Buon Ma Thuot.
Soon after leaving, we picked up some more passengers, then some more & so on.
We hurtled along at 100mph, overtaking cars with the assumption that oncoming traffic would move out the way, so I pretty much sat back & accepted my impending death. Although it was probably the most uncomfortable journey of my life, it was also one of the most exciting as we went through extremely rural Vietnam, what the Lonely Planet calls...... 'roads less travelled!'

Tractor!

Wild West!

The towns were very 'wild west' & the locals would all stop & stare in amazement at the strange looking man on the bus!
As we were going through a town, the conductor gestured to me with his index finger whilst saying something in Vietnamese- 'nice man' I thought as I handed him my camera, only for the entire bus to laugh at me! Then the penny dropped, so I handed him the psychodelic plastic gun I'd bought at Pleiku station (don't ask!) & thus my favourite moment of my travels so far was hurtling through a wild west town, crammed into a minibus built for sixteen, with twenty one other people, a rooster, two rabbits & a cage packed with live chickens, with the whole bus bopping along to Vietnamese rave music, which was blaring out & the conductor leaning out the door pretending to shoot all the local kids on their way home from school!

Party Bus!

Don't ask!

Farmers

Know when to leave...... We arrived in Buon Ma Thuot too late to get my connection, so they left me at the bus depot where a chap was, I gathered, telling me to come back at 6am. Then he handed me a shot of some hideous rice wine they were drinking, force fed me some minging local dish they were eating, pulled up a seat & ushered me to sit down. I had an awesome evening sat in a family run bus depot, with the family, eating, drinking & them teaching me Vietnamese words & testing me. However, about three hours later, after insisting that I couldn't take them up on their offer of sleeping in the mini bus or marrying the main guy's sister, he eventually grabbed my arm, threw me out on to the street & left me to find a hotel in a strange town where no one spoke English & I could hardly see for the rice wine we'd been drinking, telling me again to come back at 6am!
The next day was definitely the worst journey of my life. I turned up & failed the Vietnamese vocab test, as I could only remember three words of the twenty they'd taught me. The minibus was overpacked again & this time we were winding our way up the mountain to Dalat. The girl sat next to me on her Dad's lap was the first to vomit, which set off a chain reaction through the bus & I had to sit for most of the journey listening to a variety of different chunders; coughy ones, gurgly ones, wretching ones..... every now & then the bus would pull over, everyone would chuck their sick bags out the window & off we'd go again- definitely one of the most unpleasant experiences of my life, so I was delighted after five hours to finally arrive in the picturesque town of Dalat!