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Published: March 15th 2010
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Overnight bus
The bus was full of reclining sleeper beds. Having to catch the night bus tonight instead of the day train I had originally planned to take today, I had a day to relax on my hands. I spent most of it enjoying a break from touring. I used some of that time to take care of my accommodations in Hanoi and looking at a guidebook on it and two nearby areas for day trips, as I’ll be in that part of the country for the next week and a half. I also caught up on my journal entries.
In the mid-afternoon, I finally left the hostel as Barbara and I went out to grab something for lunch. We walked down the main street and didn’t find anything. Along the way we ended up stopping in an art gallery and explored that for the next hour. It was all abstract art by a Vietnamese born man who moved to Paris in his youth. The art wasn’t really my type but I did like a few of the blue back dropped paintings; a set of them with eyes looking out and a few with Buddha faces. We returned towards the hostel where we dined at the same place at which
Sleeper bed
A shot of one of the beds. we had breakfast yesterday morning.
It was about time to leave so I finished packing and went online briefly before grabbing my things and checking out. On my way downstairs, a staffer asked if I was going to Hanoi. Another asked at the front desk. This seemed strange. They then informed me that my ride to the bus had come and gone. I showed them that the ticket showed a pickup at 4:30 and it was only 4:25 so they called the tour company, which agreed to pay for me to take a cab. It seems that in this part of the world the concept of time measurement is largely just that - a theory and not a practice.
I made it to the bus in plenty of time and boarded, noticing the strange interior design. It is actually a sleeper bus, with two tiers of seats. People sit in them with legs extended horizontally and the seat back can either go up so you sit with legs raised or virtually flat for sleeping. I hadn’t come across anything like this before.
We stopped a couple hours along for dinner. I noticed how dark it was where we were and thought it very strange to be coming to a place to get dinner without lights. It turned out that the area had suffered a power outage. Most people went into the closest restaurant and dined by candlelight. I wasn’t sure if the place could properly cook and they certainly couldn’t see well to do so, so I walked down the road and found a place that had power and ate there.
I made it back in time to go but it didn’t matter. After we were all on the bus, the bus driver had problems getting the bus into first gear. Each time he tried it would stall. He worked on it for about 45 minutes and finally got us on our way.
The rest of the night was uneventful. I started
Gulliver’s Travels and tried to keep the guy next to me from cuddling with me rather than his girlfriend (that’s a bit of an exaggeration but it felt that way).
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