What is there to say – 17 hours in a bus…..
Got to the bus station at 11:00 so that we would have enough time to pack bikes onto bus. After showing up and the bus driver (and his own “optimizer”) looked at us, it was off to work – front tire off, saddle down, and into the underside of the bus – they actually fit quite well (upright) under the bus. The rest of our bags were packed in/around, and all we had left was some “hand luggage” for inside the bus (valuable items such as cameras/laptops,….) – not realizing that there really wasn’t any room for hand luggage inside the bus…
I got massively yelled at for entering the bus with my shoes on, and was quite bruskly escorted off the bus – eveidently, we had to wait to board….
So we waited until about 10 minutes before departure, and everone got on (taking their shoes off). This was a sleeper bus, meaning window sleeper-seat – aisle – middle sleeper-seat – aisle – window sleeper-seat and this with a top and bottom level. At the back of the bus were 5 sleeper-seats next to each other across.
I had the “privilege” of having a center sleeper seat in the back row – very “cosy”. Jörg had a window seat, but they were too short for him…. and this for the next 20-odd hours….
Not only did they fill all the seats, as we got out of town, we kept on adding passengers, so that by the time we were done, the aisles (floor space) was full as well (hence the not wearing shoes) – fortunately, behind my seat against the back window there was room for Jörg and my “hand luggage”, otherwise we would have had that on our laps for 20 hours as well.
Well – not much to say other than, the girl at the window seat in the back row was throwing up most of the bus trip (into plastic bags that were then thrown out the window)) – her mother next to me was constantly helping her, but was extremely helpful and conscientious of Jörg and I (even though we couldn’t really communicate). The bus stopped only 3 times in the 17 hours that it eventually “only” took – once for dinner (that was included in the bus ticket), and twice for toilet.
But after going through my Cell-phone play list once, we were in HCMC – I got some sleep (amazingly) and it was cosy, but not cramped – a lot better than I imagined. Jörg didn’t fare as well, and hardly slept…
Arrived at 6am in HCMC and were faced with a trip across town in rush hour traffic….. (16km across town)…. we were well awake and full of adrenalin by the time we got to our hotel. No amount of pictures or videos can describe the experience of cycling through HCMC in rush hour – chaos, pandemonium, swarms of scooters, fumes, heat, seemingly random patterns through intersections. Its amazing that it works, but somehow it does in this city, and to some extent cycling through all this is exhilarating and exciting – I don’t think anywhere I have been has been quite as full and noisy and chaotic….
Got to hotel, checked in early and first went to sleep for a few hours.