Woke up early to book my bus and had some breakfast whilst waiting for my 9:30am departure. Double checked how long the bus journey would take and was told 13 hours which I wasn't looking forward to but seemed bearable. Went off to buy some bread for the journey.
The minibus arrived to pick me up from the hotel pretty much on time and we set off on our journey after picking up a few other people from other hotels. I got chatting to a guy who was originally from Cambodia but moved to America as a refugee after the Vietnamese "liberation" of Cambodia.
I'm not sure the bus driver had every driven a manual vehicle before as he constantly tried to pull away in 5th before restarting the engine and doing the same a few times. He had a tendency to accelerate quickly take the bus out of gear and then jam it back into the gear he was already in causing us to slam into the seats in front and also to take the bus out of 5th gear at speed and ram into 3rd gear having the same affect. Maybe he just like torturing us, I'm not sure.
After around 2 and a half hours we reached the border and got stamped out of Cambodia and into Vietnam with very little fuss. In fact it was all going much better than I thought, even the minibus came through and we all piled back on until we got to Ha Tien city. At this point we all got off and had to wait around 1 1/2 hours for another bus to arrive. I was OK with this as it meant I could have a wander, buy a Vietnamese sim card and change some dollars for dong (snigger). One of the western girls on the bus, an American named Rachel got quite pissed off as they initially refused to give her an onward ticket to Saigon a she'd let the bus driver take her original ticket off her. After lots of swearing and name calling from Rachel they gave in. Not how I would've dealed with the situation but it seemed to work and was quite amusing.
The bus arrived a few minutes late and turned out to just be a small local bus full of Vietnamese. Not that this is a problem, but it really wasn't turning out to be the "VIP" service that always gets promised. This bus was quite annoying. It had been raining heavily whilst we were waiting for the bus and the roof was leaking above the only seats that were left. It also spent the first 30 odd minutes of the journey driving at walking pace, and I'm not exaggerating, bicycles pedalled by 70 year old men were flying past us. After this the driver then decided to drive at the speed of sound, as is the norm it seems for buses in Asia, for the rest of the journey. I've got used to this but the two German girls that were also on the bus looked scared to death.
After a while once of the westerners, I can't remember who, got talking to a vietnamese family who spoke good english and we discovered that this bus was actually only going to Can Tho not all the way to Saigon so we'd have to change again.
After about 4 hours we stopped and I was poked by the driver through my open window, when I turned he said "you go toilet". I said OK and he led me by the arm to a secluded wooded area where I wasn't sure if I was about to sexually assaulted or left to urinate. Fortunately it turned out to be the latter.
I got back to the bus and noticed everyone else was still on it. Not sure why I had been singled out for the toilet but eventually other people got off and we had a few minutes before the driver started pushing me back onto the bus and then beeping the horn frantically to hurry everyone along.
It was a good few more hours until we got to the next stop, which I don't remember the name of and we were bundled off the bus and left standing around not knowing what was going on. After a while the driver started throwing everyone's bags onto the dusty bus station floor so I went to pick mine up and noticed it was wet and that it stank of fish. When I looked in the luggage compartment of the bus I noticed it had been rammed in next to an unsealed polystyene container which obviously contained fish and dirty stinky fish water which was now all over my bag. Awesome. Of course the bus driver wasn't in the slightest bit interested.
We crossed accross the dual carriageway and were bundled onto a local minibus, hoping it was actually the correct one, and set off at warp speed. The only seat free for me was on the back row and the back row is not somewhere you want to be on a road as bumpy as this one with a driver that slows down for nothing.
This bus stopped constantly to pick up and drop off until eventually I had the back row to myself so I could lay down and try to get some sleep between being lifted out of the seat by another bump. This was short live however as I was shortly woken by a Vietnamese guy kicking my legs because he wanted to sit down.
By this time is was about 10-10:30pm and Rachel, the loud american girl, had decided she was hungry. As she was sat next to the driver she badgered him constantly by loudly repeating "Food, I need food" for about 30 minutes until the driver finally relented and pulled up next to a steamed dumpling stand. The dumpling stall owner I'm sure doubled the price at the sign of white faces and decided they were 20,000 dong or about 1 dollar but we couldn't be bothered to argue and bought some. I was so tired that I ended up paying with a 200,000 note instead of a 20,000 but fortunately the seller gave me my change.
We then continued on at insane speed with the usual constant beeping until we arrived in Saigon. Only of course it wasn't in the center, it was a good few miles outside and the normal moto drivers pounced telling us that we had to go with them as it was the only/cheapest/whatever lies they tell to get your money way to get to where we wanted. I'd heard about this scam with buses before so argued with the driver about being taken to the main bus station but he point blank refused to let us on the bus. By this point Rachel had flagged down a taxi and we gave up and were taken to the backpacker area on the meter.
Everyone else had a room booked so the german girls went off to find theirs and I went with Rachel as hers was in the cheaper area of town but, as it tuned out, at $15 a night, not cheap enough for me so I started looking elsewhere and eventually got an OK room for $8.
By this time it was well past midnight and I'd been travelling for 17 hours so, after a quick Skype with Anji, I had a well deserved sleep.
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