Night bus: Hoi An - Ninhvana

We spent a good hour waiting at reception for our night bus. It did not arrive at the hostel, instead we were rushed into a taxi along with Seb and a boy we didn’t know. We were told we were the last ones to get on the bus and it was running late. The ticket system was madness. The woman at the ticket office wrote and rewrote paper tickets for us several times. The tickets were written in Vietnamese so when she finally gave them to us we didn’t notice when she got ours and Ali’s (the guy from the taxi) mixed up. Following this we had to wait for the driver and his friend to load what looked like two large wooden engraved wheels into the luggage compartment of the bus. Then finally we were allowed on but not before taking our shoes off and putting them in a bag. We tried to take some seats near the front but the driver was adamant that these seats were reserved so the 4 of us had to go right to the back of the bus where 5 seats were side by side on an elevated platform. Luckily these beds had more leg room but we were packed in and had little headroom.

It turned out that we weren’t the last people to board the bus. Three girls got on and like us one of the girls was directed to the back seats and she took the middle bed. The preferential allocation of seating to the locals plus the disorganisation of the tickets actually led us to bond with some of the other passengers. We quickly got chatting to Ali from the taxi ride and the girl who joined our back seats, Emily. The shared experience of the mad journey meant that it was easy to get along and laugh off the difficulties involved along the way. The main part being dropped off on the side of a busy main road at 4am with the only information being a piece of paper with a phone number and the name of the petrol station across the road. A couple of the others were told that the shuttle would pick us up between 4.30 and 5.30 am. We sat in the darkness half asleep wondering how we had got into this situation. The service station described on the piece of paper was on the other side of the road. We thought about crossing over but we were trying to trust the system that we were dropped in the correct place.

What seemed like a significant amount of time later a minibus stopped at the service station. Two girls who had been waiting further along the road from us made the move to cross over toward the mini bus. We followed their lead, in the darkness we made our way across the road with our huge bags. The move paid off as it was the correct transfer and soon enough we were on our way to the coastline toward Ninhvana. For me the journey seemed very surreal - I was half awake watching the sun coming up over the sea, emerging through the clouds. I was fixated on the views but also chatted away to two sisters from Wimbledon.