Finally, something terrible happened to me!
I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of the succession of happy moments.
But variety delights me.
That’s why I suffered a little on Monday.
Sleeper bus from Sa Pa
This is the third time I’ve tried a bus where you can sleep.
So far, 3-0 in favor of buses. Three out of three are terrible experiences. I’m slowly coming to the conclusion that this is not my favorite form of travel.
This bus left on time.
This sentence is not intended to glorify the lack of the “departure is a little late” phenomenon that is also known in Europe.
Here in Asia, “we’ll leave at some point” is completely natural. If the bus leaves an hour early… That’s it. If it’s three hours late. That’s it. I’ve had an experience where they just changed the bus to the next day and then we left 7 hours late the next day.
So there is something particularly reassuring about seeing the bus around the departure time. It is a good sign if it is there. The next sure thing is when I can actually get on it.
If it does leave around the expected time, you can still only half sit back. Because I can’t forget, for example, the experience when they left me on the highway 40 kilometers from the city where I bought a ticket. Because unfortunately we are not going to that city.
So, if the bus is there within a short radius of the departure time, I can get on it and it is apparently going where I want to go, then – you could say – we are on track.
In the case of this sleeper bus, I even had to worry about whether the bed I bought would be available. I had a bed when I arrived in Vietnam, but then I spent 15 hours lying on the floor.
On Monday night at 11:03 PM (3 minutes late, I didn’t even notice!) the bus left. My luggage was at the bottom, I was reclining in my own(!) bed, the curtains drawn.
Everything was perfect.
The bus starts
The feeling of perfection then jumped off the bus at breakneck speed after the second corner.
It took me that long to realize that this trip would not be in my top ten best experiences.
The bed was also a shaking bench. They are used in several industrial areas, and it must be a great experience for a car, but I didn’t like it. Fun fact, they also built a massage function into the lower half of the bed. If you want to enhance the experience even more.
I discovered what three dimensions mean. The bus shook up and down. Right and left. And forward and backward.
The part of the bed above the waist was tilted at 45 degrees and it stayed that way the whole time because it couldn’t be changed. This angle of inclination may be good for an afternoon rest, a movie, but it is definitely not good for sleeping. At least for someone like me, who can’t sleep on his back. The designers probably intended this to be sleeping on my back. I realized this because I couldn’t use the seat belt. It couldn’t be adjusted in length. If I was lying on my back, I could fasten it – to avoid falling off the platform. However, as soon as I turned on my side, this belt was so tight that the pain principle made it impossible to rest.
Sleeping on my side worked. But only partially. Because I could use about half the length of the bed because of the folded top. This put my legs in strain everywhere. Because of the movement of the bus and the lack of a seat belt, I could only lie on my left side. Since I sometimes like to turn over before falling asleep, I felt like a steamship running on half steam.
The fact that the bus is very noisy doesn’t bother me. But it is noisy, and I have to mention it here. Very noisy, to be precise.
Cold air was blowing at 60 km/h from two small air vents above my waist. They were switched on centrally. You can’t turn it off locally in the cabin. You can just cover it, but it still works. And it hisses like a snake all night long.
The curtains should be drawn when you’re sleeping. I don’t mind being watched, but the girl sleeping 60 cm away from me might be sick if she saw me drooling. So, it’s only out of love for humanity that you should draw the curtains.
Yes, but if the curtains are drawn and the tornado is closed, the air will run out very quickly. You can feel it quickly. And then the child of a man opens the air vent. So I practically froze my hips all night long. I thought it would be better to live with peritonitis than not wake up in the morning because I choked.
I had to think about what else was wrong with me.
I had the feeling that I was shaking, choking, cold, uncomfortable. I don’t count the fact that on such buses the drivers imagine themselves to be dog trainers and the passengers are also seriously stressed. But something was missing from the list.
Oh, yes!
Motionickness
As we set off and the bus started to shake, I felt something was wrong. It was a gut-wrenchingly familiar feeling.
But if I could do it on the boat trip around Cat-Ba, I could do it again – I thought. So after setting off, I focused for a long time on not letting motionsickness make this trip even worse.
I did it again! After two hours, the struggle was over. I didn’t get sick. My will prevailed over my body. I was very happy about that.
We finally arrived!
In total, I probably slept for two hours out of the seven.
I woke up to the bus slowing down.
I was filled with boundless happiness when I saw the familiar bus station in Ninh-Binh.
I arrived.
A confession
Okay, I have to confess something.
I didn’t suffer that much.
It was a terrible trip. And all complaints are legitimate complaints.
But 10 minutes after departure, the title of this post popped into my head.
Finally, something terrible happened to me.
But from then on, I was thinking with mouth-to-ear about how I was going to tell this story.
And from then on, the terrible turned into a story.
And that was a different team.
Buy me a coffee?
If you enjoyed this story, you can buy me a coffee. You don’t have to – but it means a lot and I always turn it into a new adventure.
Buy a coffee for Steve
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