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Published: December 15th 2008
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Group Activity: Surviving a Vietnamese Bus
Instructions: In groups of four or more, collect the needed items and reenact a Vietnamese bus ride from hell.
Estimated time to completion: 5+ hours. At least.
Roles:
1) Passenger: All you need is an imagination and a will to survive. Hold on tight.
2) Driver: Preferably someone who chain smokes and has a cell phone that rings constantly. Driving experience completely unnecessary, but must be comfortable using a horn. You should also only know two speeds: faster than the speed of light and slower than a snail. You will be driving on roads that alternate between pavement, mud, river, gravel, and any other surface you can dream up. Feel free to shake up the passenger as much as you feel the situation necessitates - it should be a LOT.
3) Narrator: You will read the instructions while other members carry them out.
4) Prop Master: You will make life living hell for the passenger. Your only job is to put seemingly random items in front of the bus at very regular but unpredictable intervals. Feel free to begin before the bus has even started its engine.
Items needed before
you begin:
1) A swivel chair. One wheel should work, one should be stuck, one should be wonky, and one should be missing.
2) An air horn. A really, really loud one.
3) Cardboard cut-outs: A motorcycle, a cow (or six), mange-ridden dogs, children, boulders, construction workers, etc.
4) DVDs: Music videos from the 1980's and early 90's and cock fighting (yes, you read that correctly).
Instructions:
The passenger should be seated as comfortably as possible in seats made for someone considerably smaller. The passenger has chosen the front seat in order to avoid the really noise and obnoxious World Challenge high school group that is also on said bus. The bus driver begins the journey pissed off because it takes him 23948723 attempts to back out of the bus stop. He travels through the city about 56 times faster than he should be, hitting the horn about every .000923 seconds. He stops for no one and makes angry gestures at everyone. The driver likes to alternate between break neck speeds and dead stops, with no shades of gray in between, resulting in the passenger being sloshed around a bit.
Still within the first 5 minutes of
the journey, the passenger is vaguely amused by the Milli Vanilli and Weird Al videos that are playing right above their head. Occasionally the passenger looks out the front window to see a VERY near miss with a truck or a bike or a dog or a man-eating pot hole. Quickly the bus gets out of the city and onto a one lane road (and I do mean one lane. Not one and a half, not one and a quarter, but one lane). There is still plenty of motorbikes on the road carrying various loads and numbers of passengers. The driver must make sure to deafen both the passenger as well as anyone within 6 miles of the bus by honking sporadically but consistently.
Quickly the road turns from bad to worse. The bus is leaving the mountains and headed to the coast so the road is windy and in various states of decay. Within 30 minutes of leaving the city the bus enters a section of road under extreme construction. The one lane is reduced to half a lane and the bus must cross mounds of dirt and rivers while avoiding construction workers, boulders, large construction trucks, motorbikes,
children, dogs (this is where the Prop Master must shine). Awful music videos continue to dictate the mood on the bus. The passenger, who has a front row view of where the bus is headed, alternately grabs the seat and closes their eyes.
The driver chooses to stop for a 20 minute break in the middle of nowhere. The driver must wait until they are not within 50 km of any other humans before stopping in the middle of the freeway and letting the passenger fend for them self while trying to pop a squat on the side of a cliff. After said 20 minutes has passed, the driver should honk the horn and give everyone 1 second to get on the bus before leaving without them. At this point the driver puts on the DVD of cockfighting accompanied by a techno soundtrack filled with clucks and squaks. The co-driver watches raptly with a grin on his face. The driver should continue to drive at alternating paces down the mountain, driving slow when it's possible to drive fast and fast when it's too dangerous to do so. When the driver reaches the bottom of the mountain 45 minutes after
the last stop, the driver will announce to the passenger that they have a 45 minute break in a little restaurant in the middle of nowhere. By this point the passenger is just ready to get to the destination and would like nothing less than another break in the middle of nowhere.
At the end of the break, the driver should sneak back on to the bus, honk once, and leave without anyone who did not psychically know that they already had to be on the bus. One or two passengers should be left behind, though not the passenger in this exercise as they were smart enough to run when the bus started up. Now that the driver is in the flats there are even more obstacles to avoid. There are also more motorbikes that need to be honked into submission. Finally, after five hours of hell, the city is in sight and the driver slows to about 2 km/h. The driver occasionally makes random turns only to make a U-turn and continue in the direction he was originally going. The passenger has been seeing signs indicating the distance to the destination but they are inevitably incorrect as the
12 km sign was passed half an hour ago. Finally, after five and a half hours, the bus drops the passenger in the middle of nowhere.
You have just experienced 5% of a Vietnamese bus ride. For the other 95% of the experience, come to Vietnam.
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