Happy Year of the Buffalo

Sleeper buses, Tet and clothes shopping. An irresistible mix

Some will know that we trained for the use of public transport. After many years in the NT where public transport was not a serious option for getting around we, or more precisely I, had developed a bit of a dislike for the option. Training on the Brisbane system wasn't bad but it didn't do much to assist in coming to grips with the roads in Vietnam and definitely not with the sleeper buses.

The road down to the coast from DaLat wasn't bad, as roads go. It was rough, a bit skinny in places and wound spectacularly along the ranges but it wasn't too busy on the day we travelled down to Nha Trang. It was an old-ish bus with a driver of similar vintage - in relative human years. I was happy to see a more mature driver at the wheel but a little less sanguine about the bus. No problem going down the mountain though. Brakes became a bit whiffy but not so much that you would get too worried. The little girl in the seat in front found it all a bit much and delivered her breakfast to her mother's lap but everyone else handled the trip well. Until there was a clatter from the back and the bus pulled over on the side of the road. Driver hops out, drags out his tool kit and commences to remove, loosen and otherwise dismantle bits of the motor to repair a broken belt. He fixed it in no time. The next time it broke, on the road into Nha Trang, he had a quick look, said something like 'Bugger it' and we drove on. It seems it was just the air conditioning belt that had broken this time and we were pretty close to the end.

Nha Trang seems to be a place you love or hate. It is clearly set up for tourists. Nice beach - has the China Beach Sailing Club but the 'real' China Beach is supposedly up near DaNang. Some nice looking resorts and a lot of hotels, bars and restaurants. We had decided not to actually stay in Nha Trang and to, instead, head on up to Hoi An. We had 5 or 6 hours to kill in the place before we hopped on the overnight sleeper bus to Hoi An. As I said, there are plenty of bars and restaurants but do you spend a lot of time in those before you sit on a bus for 12 hours? So we spent a little bit of time in them and the rest we walked around the town. Our summation of the place is that you could easily spend some time here, provided you were happy with lazing about taking it easy moving gently from the water to the sand, to the bar and back again.

We hopped onto the sleeper bus at about 7.00 pm. They had put on an additional bus because this one was full. We were on the full one. Not sure about bus 2. Now when we were sold the tickets the lady smiled when she told us we were in seats 15 and 16. We thought she was being nice and smiled back. They may not have been both of the worst seats in the bus but 15 was along with 17 and 19. 16 and 18 at least allowed you to stretch out your legs. All 5 of these seats were across the back of the bus carefully fitted under another 5 above us. Could I sit up? Nope. Could I crawl out? With difficulty. This was made worse by the fact that we had taken 'carry on' baggage - two day packs and a small travel guitar. Very silly.

Displaying the soles of your feet is apparently a no-no in Vietnam, as it is in a few other places. After trying to get comfortable for a while I decided to be offensive and popped them up on the back of the seat in front. No one seemed to care that much.

The seats are actually a lot more flash than the ones on the sleeper buses in China that we saw - but never travelled on - a few years ago. They are vinyl covered and basically can be made to lay pretty well flat. If the bits of you that bend fit into the bits of the seat that bend they can be comfortable. I wasn't all that well synchronised with the seat but it wasn't too bad. My back is recovering. The only time it became more than a little unbearable was when the air conditioning went, or was switched, off somewhere close to midnight. I did find that one of the windows opened though and that gave relief to my fellow passengers until the window was shut, pretty definitely, by one of the staff. The air conditioning came back on.

I have to say in defence of the sleeper bus that almost every other seat looks pretty good and suffers few of the disadvantages of ours. You lay in recliners with a walking space alongside and a place, or sorts to park your bags. There is a toilet on the bus that seems to be kept clean and the buses do get along with a minimum of the fuss that the traffic causes during the day.

I should also say that being jammed up in the back wasn't as off putting for us as it was for others. We, after all, have now been sleeping together for the last 37 years - give or take a little. Our fellow passengers up the back were 2 young female backpackers who had to snuggle up to the much older bloke and they found it a little more confronting I think.

Will we take a sleeper again? Yes, but perhaps we will make sure we are in other seats.

We had picked Hoi An as the place we would spend Tet. We expected that just about everything would shut for the holidays and we were pretty close to right. Tet is essentially about family. Everyone desperately tries to get to wherever home is to spend their time with the family. I am not too sure how long the holiday lasts. For some restaurants in Hoi An it didn't even last for a day but for many of them it lasted a few days. Even now almost a week later there are still a lot of places that are closed for Tet.

Hoi An decided to celebrate Tet by putting on a show for everyone. A river runs through the town and this was the centerpiece of the celebration. We had a temporary stage set up from a bridge across the river. Large animals lit from inside floating in the river, hundreds of performers who put on a pretty good show, a couple of speeches from the local communist party chief and the tourism chief, masses of lanterns everywhere and then they lit lanterns that filled the river.

Being pretty smart people we figured out in the afternoon that something was on. We figured that you wouldn't see massive constructions of animals floating in the middle of the river unless they were going to do something. When we saw the masses of electric wires being run along the street and the water's edge we were pretty sure. What sealed it were the placards hanging off every post. Hadn't noticed them before.

One interesting bit of the display was the trick of lighting lanterns, tying them to balloons and letting them go. We watched some come down apparently on top of houses. It would be a bit of a problem if you were one of the thousands of people at the celebration and watched a burning lantern drop onto your house. Didn't seem to be any major fires as a result but a lot of people must have been a little nervous.

One of the attractions of Hoi An was the tailors. There was an intention to fill some of the remaining gaps in the packs. Guess what all of the tailors in Hoi An do during Tet? They have a holiday. Luckily there were a few that had had a bad enough year in 2008, or were simply trying to serve the public. Some of the gaps were filled and apparently satisfactorily.

There is little use for us, of course, in having a lot of stuff made here given that we will be on the road for a long time. There are suggestions that we might come back.

Hoi An is not an especially big place, in Vietnamese terms. The main areas of interest for visitors seems to be the part of the town that remains pretty much as it was during the French times. The area of the town that has been maintained is World Heritage listed. It is caught in its own time warp of colonial France and overall the effect is interesting.

Restaurants are plentiful and some of them were especially good, although I have to say that the ones recommended by the Lonely Planet were not routinely good. We didn't try them all of course but I am beginning to wonder whether a recommendation in LP means both that the you are able to relax a little and that you can jack your prices up. This doesn't happen to them all of course. The best we found was on the road along the river near the Japanese bridge called Cafe Citronella. We thought the food was average in the Cargo Club - and the service was lousy. Overall though the restaurants were good and the food and prices were all pretty reaonable.

We took another bus from Hoi An to Hue. This was a 6 hour haul along the coast. The key feature of the drive could have been a trip through a famous pass. Instead, it was a trip through a tunnel that was at least 2 km long though the mountains. We had been expecting some scenery with the mountains coming down to the sea and us up on top but it wasn't to be. The bus was a sleeper bus but this one was in daylight and we had good seats.

Hostelworld came through again for us with our place in Hue. The Holiday Hotel is relatively small and again in an alley. It is well located just a little distance from the centre of town, the staff are friendly and competent and the rooms are great. Even down to sprinkling rose petals on the bed. All good at the price of $20 US per night each. Breakfast is included and is reasonable.

I suppose like a lot of my generation I came to know Vietnamese towns and areas during the war - the American War as it is known here. I remember the furore when the Americans bombed Hue and the consternation that caused for a lot of people who had not previously seemed to care much about the war. Hue is the old imperial capital. Temples and pagodas along the Perfume River and the Citadel. It was the Citadel that the Americans bombed. Can't remember why. Perhaps they thought, as I did, that it had some military purpose. Doesn't though. It is a nice little home built on a many hectares by a couple of previous kings of Vietnam.

We took a trip up the Perfume River to look at some temples, pagodas and palaces. A big day but at least now we can leave all of the rest of this type of thing to one side. It is possible to get 'templed out'.

On our way tomorrow to Hanoi. Transport infrastructure appears to still be under pressure. The only seat we can get is on an overnight train, a hard sleeper no less. We have travelled on them before in China. Should be interesting to compare.

We had a brief thought about pulling up along the way but opted instead to spend some time on a trip up to the north. More in due course.

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