Laurie's World

…..if I’m going to survive (and thrive) here!

So here I am again, on a bus ride death trap. Always good to write a blog entry during one of these rides so that the emotion is raw and you all can feel my fear leaping off the page. Plus it helps pass the time. We need to get ourselves to Nha Trang and options are sort of limited if you are trying to keep costs under control. So in a foolish weak moment I agree to take the four hour bus ride for 130,000 dong ($6.50 usd) vs lord knows what for a private car and driver. (Prolly well over $125??). The hotel ‘arranged’ it for us – which means they called bus depot and prebooked us two seats on the 11am bus. They assured us that a shuttle would come get us and that we should be ready at 10:15am. We were, and at 10:25 I checked with desk. “Yes, everything ok-he coming”. At 10:42, asked again, she called “yes, he coming soon”. A small red bus pulls up at 10:44 and honks his horn, desk girl gestures us out. And we are off. Bus depot is about 5 minutes away, so in we go and I get in a line to buy the tickets. Under the “Nha Trang” sign. I fight the good fight and get to the front despite many attempts at being cut off. (Similar rules in bus ticket line as at the washroom-but I’m getting BADASS at this now). The ticket girl says to me “do you have a ticket?”  I say “no” (isn’t that what this line is for?????) do she ushers me over to another line. Uh oh….

I get myself to the front of THAT line, and there are two ladies flipping through a book of names. I (rudely I guess) interrupt them trying to buy my two tickets and they look at me like I’m from mars. They say something like “do you have booking??” AHHH YES I DO! I get what is happening now. I should have told the girl at the first line yes. Bcz in theory my hotel reserved me the seats. I just have to pay now. I go back to the first line and manage to get to the front without getting cut. Had to physically intervene when a lady straight up barged in front of me right as I was about to get my tickets. The ticket girl gave me the nod like she knew I was next. Felt vindicated 😏 Gotta be less Canadian here I think! Get my Asian on. 

Got my two tickets, walked out at moments past 11, bus just starting it’s engines. Said goodbye to the bag as it goes under the bus and tbh we might never see it again. (In its current condition- busses are notable here for having problems with bag security). We got on the bus with our carry-on bags (that have everything valuable in them) and the sleep machine. We have to take off our shoes and put in plastic bags (which is a gigantic pain in the butt) and we grab the first two seats we find. I’m thinking this will be ok as at least my seat adjuster works and I can put my seat up (unlike the bus ride from Sappa last summer where I had to do the entire thing laying down- scariest ride of my life coming down off that mountain). We just get settled in and a guy comes along and asks for our tickets. I happily pass them over, thinking it’s a ticket checker. Ha! Sort of. It’s a guy who is checking our seat numbers….apparently it’s assigned seating?? So we have to move to the back of the bus on the lower level. Which is fine with me as personally, I think the top seats are scarier. It seems more like you’ll tip over up there. And just visualize Troy and I hiking our North American selves up to those bunks up there! No small feat. Anyway, all is fine other than guess what??? I got the crappy broken seat again that doesn’t sit up. 😤😤😤

So here I LIE terrified of going over this mountain. At least I’m in the middle so don’t HAVE to look out the window……hundreds of these busses go up and down daily and I’m not aware that many don’t make it. So I guess it’s all part of the adventure. And it has WiFi so I can blog, play words with friends and catch up on Facebook that pass the time. 

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 22nd, 2018 at 9:12 pm and is filed under Thailand 2018. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.