Bus Trip to Hue
Trip Start
Sep 05, 2008
1
48
68
Trip End
Ongoing
Hue,
Vietnam
Saturday, November 1, 2008
We pottered around, a meal here, a beer there, wasting away the time to 6pm, when the bus would leave. We'd already seen everything we wanted to in Hanoi and the rain was too heavy to venture far.
6pm came and we got onto the bus, which had pulled up around the corner from the hotel. It was clearly not the sleeper bus that we'd booked. The sleeper bus has three rows of reclining seats/beds in two layers, like bunks. This was a normal coach.
"Don't worry" we were reassured, "sleeper bus is three kilometres out of town, unable to get into town because of the floods." It goes without saying that if a normal coach could get through the floods, so could a sleeper coach. Let's see what happens.
We waited for about 30 minutes whilst others got on the coach. Then we drove about 50 yards to pick up a few more people, then a few more yards, a few more people. In an hour and forty minutes we travelled about half a mile. Then we left the city, through some pretty impressive floods, and drove to where we were to get the night coach.
Surprise, surprise, no coach to be seen. We're really tired of this carry on by now. What there was to be seen, however, was a proliferation of Vietnamese people who proceeded to board the bus, many with masses of luggage. About 30 of them jammed their way into the already full bus and stood in the aisle. It was rammed.
The driver announced hat because of the floods the police had not allowed the night bus to travel to its normal stop, and it was a forty minute drive away. We would drive to it now. We knew that the police had nothing to do with it, and that it clearly didn't make sense that one coach is allowed through whilst another isn't. But it was 8pm; we'd already spent a day longer in Hanoi than we had intended due to the train being cancelled. What are you going to do? Myself and Kyle started to bet over what time we would arrive in Hue at, if at all.
Forty minutes of driving came and went, then another forty. We were on what was little better than a dirt road. It was higher than all the surrounding land, and was most likely the only road open. It was amazing to see just how far out of Hanoi the floods extended; fields had become lakes everywhere we looked for well over an hour into our journey.
At about 9.40pm we pulled into a lay-by. There it was, the hallowed night bus. Everybody out. Then, after ten minutes of confusion, everybody back on the first coach, and back on the road. What is going on? Catherine and I are developing a seriously bad track record when it comes to bus travel.
Half an hour more, another lay-by, another night bus. Everybody back out. All the Vietnamese people jumped straight onto the night bus, all the Westerners were stopped. There was some confusion; a few phones were being handed around by the driver so that his boss could speak to passengers in English.
"What's going on, man?" I overheard an man behind me saying, "Somebody give me a phone man, somebody needs to sort this out, I can sort it out, I'm an American." An American said this. Without irony. In Vietnam.
Eventually the story crystallised. The official line was that the night bus in front of us was not the night bus we would be catching. That was three kilometres away, and the police weren't allowing it to come to us. This night bus would take us to that night bus. But, and it's a big but, we would have to pay US$2 each. For a three kilometre ride. Brilliant. I'm not even going to start banging on about how this makes no sense, on any level. What was clear was that the driver was trying to earn a bit of extra cash for himself, and that there were about three times as many people wanting to get on this bus than there were spaces available. What was also clear, thankfully, is that without exception nobody was prepared to pay the US$2 he was asking. It was a stalemate.
Patience wore thin and eventually people started to get their luggage from the first coach and put it into the night bus. We did the same and worked our way on board. All four of myself, Catherine, Kyle and Stephanie made it on, but two men behind Kyle the line was stopped; the bus had reached capacity. We felt bad for the people left behind as we pulled away; there was talk of them spending the night there, and nobody knew what was going on. Needless to say, three kilometres down the road there was no night bus at the side of the road; we stayed on this one all night. The driver had clearly realised that there were more passengers than spaces and thought he could use this to his advantage, giving seats to those prepared to pay him a little more.
It was a bumpy ride, a busy bus, a lot of hard cornering, and sleep was not easy to come by.
