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Ninh Bình, Viet Nam
20° 15' N 105° 58' E
Jun 28, 2006 19:43
Distance 88km

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Other entries in Ninh Bình

oh.

Text written in: English

well so much for thinking I'd get some sleep on the way to VTE. this was truly bus ride from hell, of all the busses I've been on in the past months.

to start with, note the date - this marks one full year of unemployment. what an insane way to marke the day.

sooooo. I bought my ticket from my guest house in hanoi. $15 to vientiene. turns out, they put on you on a nice bus for the first 5 hours the dump you in this rank cafe waiting for what turns out to be the local bus from hanoi (as in, I could have just got on that bus in hanoi and paid 1/3 what I just paid. doh!).

well, the bus shows up so full that 3 people are already sitting in the aisles. there are 11 more of us (with backpacks) to add. you do the math. this doesn't look good.

we basically get into a 3 hour stand off between us, the drivers and the locals already on the bus. and my visa expires today so I HAVE to get out....but they offered plastic chairs in the aisles for an 18 hr trip, so at first we refuse and much yelling startes between the blond tourist and the bus-driver.

there's rumor another bus is coming, but we don't trust it, so we realize this may be our only shot at getting into laos, so we collectively pile on - backpacks and all. there are so many of us, I'm the last one on and cant even get all the way in - I'm standing on the last step. this is NO way to travel for 18 more hours. 

so now we're staging a sit-in on the bus & the driver realizes there's no way we're all going to fit. the locals have now been waiting on the non-AC bus for an hour, so once we'd piled on, they all got out.

through all this, there was loads of yelling by 2 peeps in our group. one girl and especially this guy who would get in the faces of the drivers. SO not the asian way and was really uncomfortable for the rest of us....

but maybe because of that yelling (or despite it), a mini-van shows up to cart us across the border. dawn is breaking by now and for sure no one has slept. the driver of the bus and mini-van start yelling at eachother - obviously bargaining over price. (this IS the asian way.) the pile us in and we're finally off. for about 20km. then we stop in a po-dunk town. another bus shows up, yelling tourist guy yells so much that other bus pulls away. I think we're going to get stranded....but then ANOTHER bus shows up. we try to quiet the yeller, we get thrown onto this next bus and off we head to the border.

it's now about 8am. 12 hrs have gone by but only about 6 were actually spent on the road....