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Orient express - Vietnam
by kenneth hockert | Date >
2006-02-08 | Country : Vietnam | City : hanoi
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Orient Express
Admit it...
Those of us world traveling romantics all secretly relish those epic bus rides, and are secretly disappointed when we simply get from point A to point B relatively timely and painlessly. Is it a sick pleasure in distancing ourselves from the jet setting crowds? Those that take planes or rent fancy jeeps when we measure a large part of our experience on the amount of time wasted waiting for the bus to show up, how smelly the bus can be, how many times the bus stops for every other restaurant, breaks down, the disgusting bathrooms, drunk natives sitting next to you. What would third world travel be if you couldn’t stand around with a bunch of travelers bemoaning how much it sucked, even though it brought you all together and you would no doubt all be getting beers and having a blast later that night laughing about the ride....that is, if you got there. Then again though, there are always those exceptions, where it crosses the line between story and epic, usually these involve things like bent metal, bodily fluids, loose reptiles, and border police. We’ve had our share, or definitely like to hear about other peoples’ hell.
As I stood in the hotel lobby in Vientiane, Laos awaiting the arrival of the VIP bus to Hanoi, Vietnam, there was a uneasy feeling somewhere deep in the recesses of my consciousness about this ride involving mountain passes, and a border between two communist countries. The opportunity to save some money seemed reasonable and I’d already conditioned myself with several 12 hour trips to that point, how bad could a twenty hour ride be?. The bus was a luxurious coach with plush plaid carpeted seats, and a smooth riding suspension, that was, in 1970, when it built. Coaches often get their second coming in the depths of Southeast Asia with suspect private companies, and have that certain creepy aura and distinctive old bus smell.
The bus was relatively uncrowded with only about twenty backpackers on board as we pulled out from downtown Vientiane at nightfall. There then began a slow trickle of locals and their cargo boarding on the outskirts of the city which slowly filled all the open seats. I felt most sorry for Christian and Eric, two large and long- legged Swedes I would later befriend. They had occupied the seats right behind the wheel base, where there were no seats in front of them, giving them a large gap to spread out their legs. As the bus filled though, all that luscious leg room began to disappear slowly and the look on their faces grew slowly more despondent until they basically had boxes on there laps. I was seated alone at the start, comfortably spread out over two seats, but quickly recognized the trend and moved in next to Alice, a Brazilian woman who I was chatting with earlier. She was embarking on a interesting travel project to visit social and community development projects throughout the world, and bring ideas back home. So we chatted for long time, listened to music and napped.
The bus tugged along uneventfully at a brisk 25 mph up and down windy roads, heading towards the border . At about 3 AM the bus stopped in a large parking lot outside a closed restaurant for what seemed was for a normal rest stop. Commercial buses in southeast Asia generally stop for every restaurant or business which buys them off , so there is always a good amount of loitering to be done, buying weird looking snacks. We all got out of the bus, did our normal stretching routine, peed in the bushes, and trudged back on the bus. And sat there. It became clear after about forty minutes we weren’t going anywhere. So for three hours the bus sat there, the bus driver nowhere to be seen. At six, the driver showed up, and we chug up further up the mountains. Turns out we had to wait three hours for the border to open. Never that simple as we stopped at numerous shady stores, where all types on contraband began to be loaded onto the bus. Tourist buses, I learned firsthand are often used as a means to smuggle all ranges of materials and goods across the border. The first items loaded through the back windows of the bus were the many cases of Red Bull, familiar, though not nearly as popular in America as in Europe and beyond, an energy drink made from sucrose and caffeine. The Thai version though, is packaged in a bottle akin to cough medicine, and is too strong to sell in Europe, due to its potency and inclusion of amphetamines The Red Bull was stuffed under the seats and into most open crevices . One guy brought a potato sack on board which was twitching. My eye caught another fellow deftly slide an envelope through the top-hatch emergency exit, nestling it safely on the roof of the bus.
The border crossing was about fifteen miles of red tape which took about three hours. We got off the bus, entered a house where five different officers wrote things on our entry papers, shuttled us back and forth between the same people. It is important to have one US dollar on hand, I learned earlier, to ostensibly buy your stamp, though undoubtedly was for the TV the border guy wants to buy, get stamped a couple more times, and then sit there. The officers all wore crisp olive colored uniforms, giving off that sense of uneasy military presence and seriousness that kept me on the edge of my seat. I was pretty unnerved when a rather bold fellow passenger requested a receipt for his dollar paid, and images of tiger cages and gulags appeared in my head.
We were sent back to the bus, got our backpacks, then walked over the border, only to get repeat much of the same process again, this time with luggage. Shady characters handed their passports to the border guards with money in them, and were breezed right through. Then was no sense of a line and Once past the border the bus squirmed around sharp corners on a dirt road under construction, where it seemed the previous roads had been buried by rock slides. The long waits below these slopes waiting for construction vehicles to let us pass were spent viewing large boulders hovering above
When finally past the gauntlet of the landslide hazard, and on to a paved road, our bus was stopped by the police, and we were all sent off the bus for a search. Having eaten what little food I’d brought on the bus, I wandered into a nearby cafe/store to blank stares by locals. Meanwhile the now infamous Red Bull cases were taken from the bus, stacked in the parking lot and different characters were paraded around by officials to various offices. We discovered that the customs officials wanted seven dollars for the Red Bull, which the smugglers wouldn’t pay. The stalemate seemed to be over when the “exporters” decided to leave behind the Red Bull, no doubt the border police would be drinking red Bull for breakfast for weeks to come. Of course, it wasn't that easy, because now our bus was an “illegal vehicle” due to its former cargo, and many papers had to be signed to release the bus, which took two more hours, during which I completely exhausted my hackey-sack potential and read every last thing I had left to read, save staring at food wrappers in Vietnamese. I thought of how often I’d spent seven dollars or more without thinking on a snack or a pair of socks, and how that same commodity could stop life here for three hours.
Rolling along shortly afterward, when while relaxing and watching the scenery, I heard what seemed like a loud expulsion of water from someone behind me, and felt a bit of spray on my shoulder and arm closest to the window. A quick glance at my arm revealed what looked to be a noodle, then confirming my worst fears I turned around to see regurgitated soup on the window behind me. The man had the look of pure misery, face scrunched up with the agony of tasting bile, his eyes not wanting to deal with sight of his previous meal. He dared not meet my angry stare, or maybe didn’t care. Like most inconveniences, shady dealings, and red tape, there is little pity from locals, when a tourist experience the travails they experience on a daily basis. You learn quickly that confrontation get you very little, and rolling with punches is usually the best strategy. Still, it was hard pill to swallow, and I wanted a little bit of reparation, I had that feeling of gross down to my bones. Alice kindly found some rag to wipe my shoulder off, and I was pleasantly surprised that I wasn’t exiled to some far away corner to sit next to the reptile in the potato snack, or the dead snakes in glass jars. My new friends on the bus seemed to enjoy a good laugh at my expense, especially especially soon after when someone coughed and I jumped clear out of my seat!
The bus finally reached the coast, and Vietnam’s main highway, where we turned north for the final leg up to Hanoi. Then our driver began the Vietnamese tradition of honking insidiously at everyone and everything near the path of the bus. Despite the fatigue and headache I was nevertheless enthralled as images we grew up with in the Vietnam war movies began to take shape before my eyes, as hundreds of children and adult on bicycles with conical hats lined the roadways, with a majestic background of expansive rice paddies and endless rows of houses. Using my map, I traced our tedious progress north, and my interest in the scenery one again faded toward resignation as it became clear that we weren’t going to get on a real highway soon, and we faced several hours of slow, clogged roads all the way to. So day once again turned to night, as we inched slowly toward Hanoi, the 24 hour point passed us by with still several hours left till Hanoi.
The bus stopped just outside the city and a young lady boarded the and began her well rehearsed speech in barely recognizable english that this was the end of the bus ride, and that several taxis waiting just there would happily take us into the city center, and a certain hotel would happily pay the fare, if we stayed there of course. One or two brave soldiers condemned the deal and went off on their own to find a hotel. I, for one, was a broken man, and entrapment sounded not so bad, if it involved a bed, and the fastest track to a repast of some sort. As it turned out the hotel was quite all right, good fortune comes along just as bad fortune does on the road I suppose.
And of course I sat around the next day bonding with Swedes talking about, you guessed, about that bus ride, and buying our bus tickets for our next trip ...happy travels |
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