Sorry for the Group Email

Hoi An was great, but it was very busy. Well, not busy, like real life is, but busy in the sense of five suit fittings, six shirt fittings and at least as many dress and suit fittings for Mendy.

Apart from that, we’d been going for nearly two months, a steady succession of trains, buses, planes and countless hotels and hostels. What we needed was a few days on a beach. Mui Ne, Vietnam, is the perfect choice. It has no museums and no memorials. It has, I gather, some rather fetching sand dunes, but we didn’t plan on bothering.

To get there, of course, we needed to take a bus. We boarded in the light rain for the 11 hour trip to Nha Trang. We’d arrive at 6am, and from there we’d change buses to another than would deliver us to Mui Ne at lunchtime.

As buses go, the tourist sleeper ones in Vietnam take some beating. They’re not comfortable, per se, but they’re as near as you can get. The beds are totally separate, and you get a 5’5” x 18” wedge of cushion to call your own.

Except at the back. At the back there are still separate wedges of cushion, but the five beds are immediately next to each other. They may as well be one huge, very wide mattress.

I’m a swell kind of guy, so I packed Mendy off to the remaining bed, and settled in for the night with a burly Australian and a Vietnamese man.

The Aussie on my left was no problem, once I’d recovered from my initial squeamishness over literally rubbing arms with another man in bed.

The Vietnamese man was another matter. He had the knack displayed by Asians throughout our journey of being able to sleep as soon as the brakes were released, and no sooner were we off than he was too, snoring like an imbecile.

He sounded like a contestant in a trifle-eating contest, and every few minutes he’d give a startled, guttural snort, as if he’d just inhaled something large and unhelpful: a football stud, say.

I tried everything.

I tried ignoring him, which was a dismal failure and killed under two minutes.

I tried my iPod. I got through four chapters of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Plans by Deathcab for Cutie, In Between Dreams by Jack Johnson (normally a sleep-inducing surefire), and We Were Here by Joshua Radin.

But every track and album was ruined by the pig-like snuffles of the man next to me. His wife was on the other side. I can only assume she had something terribly wrong with her ears.

I half-dozed unhappily for half an hour. Each time the dark, fluffy doorway of sleep beckoned my neighbour would give an enormous snort and I would jolt dismally awake.

I don’t know what made me do it. I certainly didn’t mean to. I didn’t consciously give the command, but suddenly my right arm folded in half at the elbow and shot like an arrow deep into his ribs.

The man gave an enormous snuffle, like someone trying to swallow a bagful of marbles, and shot bolt upright. A sudden strike of fear hit me. What if he hit me back?

But instead, miraculously, he laid back down, turned over, and slept silently. It was 4am. I slept too.

Unfortunately, I’ve mastered the knack of falling fast asleep within a few hours of our destination, and two hours later Mendy was tapping me on the foot in Nha Trang. Groggily, I gathered my things and bade farewell to my bedfellows, one of whom was wearing a puzzled expression and holding his ribs.

The next bus, for me, was great. I had my own bed and control over the air conditioning. My iPod still had plenty of power, and I slept soundly.

It was Mendy’s turn. Just after I’d fallen asleep, she began to hear distant sounds. A woman in pain, perhaps. Or panicking. What was that?

Then a man started panicking as well.

It wasn’t a horror film. Someone was watching porn on the bus.

I’m one of those sociopaths who thinks people who use MP3 player or mobile phone speakers on the bus should be shot, and I’m not the only one who thinks so.

I also think, while we’re at it, that Apple owes commuters an apology for designing the world’s leakiest headphones.

But hey, most of the time it’s music. Sure, it might be the Black Eyed Peas or Celine Dion, but I would say almost anything is better than listening to someone else listening to porn.

Presently the panicked, sweaty sounds abated and (I suspect this may have been the most traumatising part), the smell of a post solo-coitus cigarette filled the cabin.

I, on the other hand, slept like a log.

We arrived in Mui Ne at lunchtime, and took the first hotel we saw. In Chiang Kong this backfired horribly, but here we were charmed. $10 a night got us a fan-cooled room with bed sheets that looked like fruit pastille vomit on them. But we were a dozen paces from the restaurant, which sold fresh seafood and beer for under 50p, and no more than 20 paces from the ocean, which was a light blue colour and dotted with small fishing boats, pitching and rolling in the warm water.

There is, as I say, very little to do in Mui Ne. It doesn’t matter.

Dave challenges you to come up with a punishment severe enough for someone who watches porn on a bus. Be creative and leave a comment below.