Sorry for the Group Email

The Lonely Planet is snobbish about the open ticket tourist buses in Vietnam. Sure, open ticket buses are cheaper and more convenient, but “we’re not wild about them,” because you don’t meet real Vietnamese people, it whinges.

Unfortunately for Lonely Planet (which is ordinarily pretty dead-on), we didn’t have the time or money for backpacker snobbery (perhaps the most ironic and inverse form you’re likely to find), so we paid a nice man $52 each and hopped on a bus to Hoi An.

Unlike the bus we’d been promised in Vinh, the bus we got on in Hanoi actually had beds. It’s a fairly loose interpretation of the term – about six inches too short for me and about a foot wide, it was at least impossible for the person in front of me to crush my legs. At 7.45 we rumbled off into the night, picking up speed as we left Hanoi’s scooters behind.

The events of the night are fuzzy. We’d woken up after a bad night’s sleep that morning at 5am after a train ride, remember, so it’s no surprise that our bodies aimed for sleep as soon as we were horizontal.

But I never slept. Not really. Then again, I was never really awake, surging towards and away from consciousness as the bus leaned through the bends and over bumps. Then, at 5am, I experienced a brief period of lucidity. There was silence. The engine was off. Then I heard the electric starter motor. Again, and again, sometimes for five or ten seconds at a time. This was not good, I th…

Annoyingly, just as I was beginning to grasp the seriousness of being on a broken down bus in the middle of nowhere, my consciousness shrugged apologetically and I fell asleep again. The next time my eyes opened we were moving again and the sun was rising.

We arrived in Hoi An about lunchtime, and the bus was instantly surrounded by motorcycle touts, each one trying to whisk us to a hotel they could get commission from for delivering a pair of tourists. Each tout would ask each of us twice where we wanted to go, craning annoyingly over our shoulders to see our map. Then they would rifle through their business cards, giving us a choice of destinations.

Here are the facts:

1. We were tourists in a new and unfamiliar place.
2. We’d just spent the better part of 20 hours on a bus, not really sleeping.
3. We were weighed down by nearly 20kg of bags, equipment and clothes each.

What do the touts think is going to happen? Cheery smiles and a quick acquiescence to hopping on the back of a bike? Or faces like thunder and increasingly terse and rude replies?

They got the second, not least from me. My sense of humour tends to be on vapours after long journeys, and dwindles alarmingly if I’m pestered by idiots in crash helmets.

Eventually we found the Green Fields hotel, which supplied us with both a double and a single bed, a small fridge with an even smaller TV perched on top, and a WiFi connection that never quite got going. That was ok, though, as it had a pool. (Contrary to what the tourist office would have you believe, Hoi An is not coastal. Instead, it’s three kilometers from the ocean. We tried to walk it once and nearly died.)

Still, we dumped our bags and scratched our heads at the pile of dead motorcycle touts we’d been forced to haul back with us. Still, we had a room, and the horizon held sea, sand and suits.

Dave didn’t really kill anyone, but maintains the pestering approach isn’t a sound business model.