More Border Shenanigans & A Singing Night Bus

The gigantic Snake sculpture

To hasten our crossing into Vietnam, we spent one night in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh.  It was the beginning of Chinese New Year, and that evening, we saw the Cambodians out celebrating. A big hilltop shrine was packed with people and offerings, and a gigantic bamboo Snake guarded the entrance, heralding the Year of the Snake. At the top of the shrine, the incense smoke was so thick that I could hardly breathe through its perfume. 

Inside the central shrine, towering stacks of lotus flowers surrounded the large Buddha. Outside, people lined up to offer food at smaller shrines. Behind the heads of the smaller Buddhas were electric circles of light, flashing neon blue, green, and red. The remains of offered food and flowers were pushed into large piles nearby, around corners. It had the feeling of Christmas – everyone dressed up and filled with a festive cheer.

Offerings at the smaller Buddha shrines

The next morning, we caught our bus to Vietnam. It was fairly uneventful, except for some border shenanigans: a week before, my passport had been soaked when my camelback reservoir failed, and so my paper departure card from Cambodia had also been soaked and fallen apart. This caused some fun stuff at the border – I was told on the bus that I’d be charged $5 – but instead, the border guard just questioned me, scowling, and then scolded me solidly, before shooing me into line to be digitally fingerprinted (a normal process at Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam borders). However, what was more fun was that the bus almost left without me – Devlin and Lynnea had to get them to stop and come get me, as with my interview delay, it took me three times as long to get done as everyone else.

First bowl of Pho!

Finally, around 3pm, we got to Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC). We had our first celebratory bowl of Pho and made plans. Our goal was to head north – we were mainly interested in getting to Hoi An, a beautiful historical town smack-dab in the center of the Vietnamese coastline. From HCMC, it would take 22 hours on the bus. To make that a more manageable and sane chunk to swallow, we decided to catch a night bus to Nha Trang, a coastal city 10 hours away. 

But, Chinese New Year rather got in the way. In Cambodia, the holiday is celebrated for a weekend or so at most, and then everything goes back to normal. But in Vietnam, the holiday lasts a solid week, and everyone is on holiday. As a result, all the prices are inflated – doubled or tripled – and night buses go from $12 to an astronomical $22-30 per person.  Everywhere we saw tourists fighting the holiday. A group of poor souls was trying to get to Cambodia, and they got insane quotes of $75 per person, in a taxi, because everything else was booked. Later we met a couple who’d paid $100 to get from Hanoi, the big city in the north, to Hoi An – normally $24 for two. 

Really? These were the top bunks

We showed up a little early, at 8pm, to get on our $22 night bus. We got in and took off our shoes besides the driver’s wheel, and stepped into a strange little world. Three rows of bunk beds were squished into the bus, with narrow aisles between them. The “beds” were thin mattresses at an inclined angle – they could recline to a point, but beyond that you would squish the feet of the person behind you.

We were initially assigned bunks on the top – a precarious situation, as there were barely any bars to keep you from tipping out, and absolutely no seat belts. Devlin was squished between two beds, with not nearly enough space for his legs. As bottom bunks were free, we quickly convinced the attendant to let us move down. We later learned that the bus people assign foreigners to the top bunks first, reserving the bottom for locals. A kind of “tourist tax”, you might say.

Down on the bottom bunks

As the bus filled up, we tried to get comfortable. Our small backpacks were tucked between our feet. Lynnea saw a cockroach, a small half-inch long one, and squashed it with a fierce blow from her iPhone. That would not be the first cockroach we saw that night. And then the bus began to move, and the singing began. The bus’ shocks were on the verge of going out, and so we were serenaded throughout the night with a symphony of squeaks. The bus really had quite an impressive range, from little tiny moving squeaks, to long-sustained sighs, to a deep bass bellow as we hit a larger pothole. And the “music” pierced straight through earplugs.

There were several stops : one at midnight, for a last-chance potty break (there was no toilet on the bus), and again at 2am, at the coastal city of Mui Ne, where we disgorged a few sleepy souls onto the dark streets, before on we rolled/squeaked down the road. 

Nha Trang on the beach

Amazingly, despite the music of the bus, the passing lights, and the occasional phantom feeling of a cockroach crawling on me, I was able to sleep. I tucked the provided blanket around my feet, mummy-like, and put on my sweater as armor to the tickle of cockroaches. We managed fitful sleep until our bus rolled into Nha Trang, at 6:15 am. Then out we tumbled, stiff and blinking, into the clear blue sky of our first morning in Vietnam.