The Bus

The bus ride from Nah Trang to Hoi An was 13 hours long and boring as hell so I'm gonna write about it in great detail for you.

As expected the busses are not made for people my height so I was squashed. I was still in a t-shirt and shorts from the boat and the air conditioning was stuck on so I was cold. I was sitting under the main airconditioning vent which poured out water every time the bus turned a sharp corner so I was wet. We were driving past some of the most amazing coastal scenery in Vietnam but it was night time so I couldn't see it. This lasted from 6.20pm to 7.00am.

The roads in Vietnam are not good and at one stage we were driving on a single lane, muddy, dirt track in thick bush along the side of a mountain. In one little town we got completely lost. The Bus drove twice round a roundabout while both drivers, who usually took it in turns to sleep on a hammock ingeniously strung up across the middle of the bus, argued about where to turn. We reversed about 100 metres down a small lane after the drivers realised they had, after all, taken the wrong turn. And we sat in the middle of an intersection as the drivers got out to hold a conference with a group of passing locals. Eventually we did find what we were looking for in this town which was "Barbara's Kiwi Cafe" where we stopped for a midnight rest break. Here I did something that could be seen as kinda funny.

Earlier in the day I had cut my foot on some sharp rock or coral while swimming round some island. It wasn't at all bad but as I'd been walking around with bare feet for most of the day I'd gone to the bathroom to wash my foot where it was cut. As there was no bath or shower I lifted my foot up to the sink and washed it there. That is, until the sink fell out of the wall bringing pipes and plaster down with and causing a huge noise and another bruise and cut to my arm as I tried to catch it.

I calmly turned off the tap, dried my hands and walked out of the bath room where I found a Vietnamese girl who seemed to work at the cafe and pointed out the sink on the floor and hole in the wall where it had been. By the way she said "thats ok" I got that she either didn't quite get that it had just happened or that she didn't know that it had ever been any different. Oh well. I went back downstairs, finished my drink and got back on the bus.

Then, as I was getting over the strange fact that I had just ripped a sink out of the wall a women got on the bus who hadn't been there before. With a strong New Zealand accent she asked if there was a spare seat next to me. Introducing herself as Barbara we had a great chat about the 10 years that she'd spend running her cafe in Vietnam and the trouble she's had recently with the government and everything. I didn't mention the fact that I'd just ripped the sink from her bathroom wall.