D30, D31: Quỳnh Nhai to Hà Nội

March 5, 2018 to March 6, 2018

Waiting to get back on the bus at a rest stop

I'm not sure if this is the slowest bus I've ever been on but that's only because I've rarely had an available GPS tracker to tell me exactly how slow the bus I'm travelling on is travelling. All things being equal, our moving speed is a respectable percentage of both the legal and practical speed limits. It's just that we spent soooo much time not moving.

9 hours and 46 minutes from getting on the bus to getting off and staying off. 1 hour and 37 of that was time spent at a complete standstill. That's for the long stops, for the times when we had bathroom breaks or meal breaks. That's not counting the constant short stops at gas stations and villages and intersections to pick people up, drop people off, transfer packages, or apparently just stand around and hold negotiations that didn't result in any passenger rotation.

The driver would almost always get off and smoke during the negotiations.

Some rest areas were less modern than others

I really "enjoyed" picking my way through the pile of half disassembled goats on my way to the toilet

He also smoked when we were descending the crazy steep pass from Moc Chau Plateau but even if I knew how to say anything to him about the giant No Smoking sign literally right over his head, I figured that this was not a time to be talking to the driver; it was a time to be appreciating anything that helped give the driver focus.

There was no room in the under bus storage compartments so my bike, along with a single speed upright, were tied down to the roof of the bus. Since it wasn't the kind of bus that had a rooftop luggage rack or a ladder to get up the roof, this was pretty impressive. The guy who seemed to be most often responsible for negotiations climbed up like a cross between a parkour freerunner and a monkey. Then, someone still on the ground, picked my bike up and handed it up to him. I swear, even with photos and even with watching both my bike and the single speed go up on the roof and, at 3am, my bike come down, I have no idea how they did it.

It was almost a standard sleeper bus like you get in China. I never took sleeper buses very often and I've more or less completely stopped now that they aren't allowed on the roads between 2am and 5am (which is both the time most likely to have an accident and the time I would most like to be asleep while on a bus).

The standard is to have three across bunk beds with two corridors up the middle. The beds are semi-recliners and the person behind you has their feet under your head and shoulders. They're really quite cleverly engineered and I seem to recall being able to walk down the corridor without having my shoulders catch on the berths. I couldn't do that in this bus. I think they were going to tell me to move back when I grabbed the right hand bottom berth in the first row but it was pretty obvious that I didn't physically fit on the bus too well and, although there was some talking in Vietnamese and some gesturing at me, they didn't try to say anything to me.

I did not exactly fit in the berth very well

Women's urinals (aka "piss floors") at one of the rest stops

As with a Chinese sleeper bus, we all had to take our shoes off when we got on the bus and put them in plastic bags. Unlike any Chinese sleeper I've ever been on, the corridors had thick vinyl padding—rather like the mattresses—on them. This was because, later in the evening, the bus would be well overloaded past official capacity and people would be sleeping in the corridors. Padded boards would also be laid across between the top bunks turning it from two stack rows of three with corridors between them to two stack rows of five with no practical escape route in the event of an accident.

It's not the clearest photo but you can just see one of the platforms that they added across the TOP of the aisle in order to turn this from a 3 across 2 stack to a 5 across 2 stack

For the first hour or so, I had daylight to look out the window at the scenery. This gave me plenty of opportunity to confirm that, ever since I'd turned off onto the DT107/QL6B yesterday afternoon, the area had become dramatically dirtier and shabbier. The signs of traditional clothing had been reduced to every woman's long hair bound up in a bun and some of the older women wearing scarves. No embroidery. No brocade. No jewelry. Not even inappropriately fancy dresses being used to do farm work. Although there was a nice one here and there, the houses were often ramshackle construction in yards full of random accumulated trash. I'd say that it was a poorer area but it wasn't really, there were quite a number of jeeps and tractors and I don't think I saw a single lived-in building that was made out of woven straw. It was more a backwoods backwards poverty where it felt like the people just didn't care.

Then it got dark and I had nothing to do. Sometimes I'd read for a bit on my phone. Talked to Mike for most of an hour. Watched the Vietnamese karaoke on the big screen. Tried to stare out the window and see if I recognized a glimpse here or there of something I'd passed heading the other direction.

I must have fallen asleep a few times. Never for very long nor a very deep rest as the bus would inevitably stop and turn all the lights on at least once every 20 or 30 minutes. I remember noticing that the karaoke screen was turned off just after midnight but I don't think the driver's music ever stopped. When the bus filled up so much that there was now someone sleeping in the corridor next to my berth, I had to contort myself around the bags I brought on the bus to try to fit all of myself into my berth. I wouldn't even have fit very well without the bags but even if there was a tag system to make sure no one took luggage not their own, I wasn't letting my laptop go under the bus.

At about 3:30am and not exactly in Hanoi but not exactly not in Hanoi either, I was let off the bus at a petrol station.

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