The Night Bus

So, the night bus in London. Squabbling teenagers. Aggressive crackheads spouting bullshit at the bus driver in pursuit of a free ride home (or wherever).

Queasy slappers and their Ben-Shermaned beaux. Bewildered tourists. Knackered cleaners. And the ever-present danger of waking up in Colindale.

Night bus in Vietnam? Has bunk beds!

Mini-ones, certainly, tho’ not Cambodian-mini. But bunk beds nonetheless. You get on. Lounge about. Look out of your own personal window from the decadent horizontal position. Pull over the quilt. Go to sleep. Wake up several hundred miles further up the country in a different city.

In odour terms, it’s remarkably unfetid for a bus with 50-odd 18-25-year-old backpackers, one elderly Vietnamese couple and, well, us.

We like. Or kind of.

Z certainly likes very much. One practical problem is what it does to the finances the next day.

Vietnamese dong feel like Monopoly money anyway. They’re even the same sort of size. Couple that with an exchange rate of about 19,000 to the dollar, or forty quid and you’re a millionaire, and it’s a recipe for disaster. Inches of notes spill out of your wallet. You grab them in handfuls.

Miss a zero, which is easy enough, as 10,000 dong, 100,000 dong and 200,000 dong notes are all a kind of slimy colour, and every single note carries the same picture of Ho Chi Minh in his Orthodox patriarch phase, and you’re shafted.

Which is a roundabout way of saying that we caught the night bus from Mui Ne the other day, woke up in Hoi An, where every other shop sells handmade tailoring and the ones in between sell lanterns, shoes or purses, and haemorrhaged money all day long.

On the plus side, Z’s toes look great (royal blue with fishies on the big toe), he is very pleased with his deep blue silk shirt, created to his own design, and hugely excited with his short-sleeved camo buttondown with FOUR (count’em!) pockets, also his own design.

And Hoi An is undeniably a very cute town. Wooden shophouses, technicolour Chinese temples, medieval covered bridges, islands in the river with folk building boats, coracles rocking on the current, lanterns decking pastel-coloured streets.

On the down side?

There is such a thing as life being too easy. These tourist buses ply the length of Route 1, Vietnam’s coastal highway, picking up from guesthouses and delivering to AN Other hotel, depending on who’s paying the company commission.

You don’t touch the ground. Don’t touch a bus station, even. It’s the ultimate tourist bubble, just without the uniformed reps.

It’s the kind of transport where the kind of chick that gets on a bus with a guitar can shout out, in English (cos, let’s face it, there ain’t no foreigners here), “Who knows the song that Ronan Keating sang in Notting Hill?” and someone will hum a bar or two. You get off at your bed for the night, then sign up for your coach tour the next morning.

Or you don’t.

Anywise. We’re in Hue now, somewhere where the bus didn’t leave us.

If we had the time — and we have people to meet at the end of the month — I’d slow down and do things properly, get the local buses where you can get off at that nice little fishing village that really takes your fancy, hang out and chat in the proper cafes, make friends with people, head randomly into the hills, take it slowly.

As it is, I reckon, we’re heading for Laos. Then taking it more slowly, after that.