Sardine Sleeper Buses

Whenever given the choice of an overnight trip by train or bus, we ALWAYS choose train. That's because you can easily walk around on a train. There are bathrooms. The beds are fully flat. There is a restaurant car. It's a no-brainer.

We had not yet taken a bus in all of India or Vietnam mainly for these reasons (and others in India - I think an Indian bus would be pure hell and I think V would agree.) When presented with the option to take one for the Hue to Hoi An leg of Vietnam, it seemed like the logical choice because it was a day trip and only 4 hours long. We bought our tickets - they cost like $4 each or something ridiculously cheap. Curiously enough it was going to be a sleeper bus where the seats recline to nearly flat but not quite enough so that it is still uncomfortble to sleep. This seemed to be overdoing it for a day trip but this was deemed to be the most comfortable option. So we opted for it and were assigned seats 16&17.

Well, seats 16&17 were the WORST seats in the bus. This is a double decker bus with these odd seats that you slip yourself into, unless you are more than an inch taller than me and I don't know how you fit into it. Our seats were in the last row of the bus which was made up 5 seats next to each other. Our seats were the middle seats. With another 5 seats on the upper level of this bus and on top of this seating area, we had about 1.5 feet, IF THAT, of head space between our (reclinined) seats and the ceiling. This essentially meant that you could not fully sit up for any part of the ride. We were to be lined up like uncomfortable, partially squished up sardines back there.

I FLIPPED! I am one of those people that maniacally plan my seat on plane trips to ensure that I will never be in the middle of a 3 seat row. To put me back there for 4 hours, lying next to some tiny Vietnamese woman who could probably fully sit up given her size, feeling every bump on the road, and seeing NO sights while I stare at the ceiling above me was NOT going to happen.

We promptly asked if we could move and after some hand gestures of being unhappy with the sardine trap in the back, we jumped into other (reclined) seats. Luckily the bus was'nt full. I didn't care that I was roasting in the Vietnamese sun on the sunny side of the bus for the whole way down there or that I was right under the speaker for the horrid film that was playing and distracting us all from the beauty of the area. I had head room and a window!

We ended up seeing some amazing scenery of mountains, coastline, and rice paddy fields. I did vow though not to take another bus for fear of seats 16&17 for who knows what number they are on another bus and even if we did request that we not get them on a future bus, I'd never trust the travel agent. As such, I think we decided to forego Dalat and Mui Ne because I was definitely not traveling by that type of bus again. I'm not the same adventurer traveler that I once was....give me the train please.