The Bus of Doom

Thank god there are some other tourists waiting for this bus. American Travis, painfully Irish Dermot, Mr. Liverpool and myself are nervously waiting for the international bus to depart, shoulder to shoulder with some locals who unlike us seem to know exactly what's going on.

There's a terrifying middle-aged Vietnamese woman in a Prada t-shirt who keeps shouting explosively at random passengers. A man on a motorbike wearing an incongruous flowery lady's hat whisks her away somewhere, and for a moment we breathe a sigh of relief, only to suck it back in moments later when he drops her back off with some extra luggage and she walks onto the bus and starts the engine. She's either a total nutcase, or worse, the driver, and we wait in a cold sweat for an alternative to appear. Eventually he does, and relieved we remove our shoes to step on.

The nutter woman is handing out the shoe bags, which means that although she is not driving the bus she is working for the bus company. She spends the entirety of the journey through Laos barking down her phone in a voice clogged by smoking what sounds like a good 4000 Vietnamese cigarettes a day, and scowling back at the passengers.

The bus to Hanoi is a fully kitted out sleeper with three rows of comfy bunks, and we grab four at the back and settle in. We are supplied with blankets and pillows, and frosty air-con wafts from the ceiling. Dermot pulls out his laptop and invites me to watch 'Ideal' as the pulls pulls away from Luang Prubang.

 I'm very worried about this journey. There are horror stories abound about this particular land border crossing from Laos to Vietnam. For this reason, I'm wearing my money belt for the first time; anything of value I have, including my passport, is on my person.

The nerves escalate when we reach the Vietnam border, as the rip-off potential increases when you need an official rubber stamp. We follow the locals to the looming checkpoint building, an empty concrete edifice, constructed to place fear into the hearts of nervous 'farangs'. I hand over my passport, watch it get placed into a separate pile from the Asians, and then sit down to accept my fate. Scary woman shows up. She prowls alongside the glass screen and scowls at the uniformed officials. She gets her passport back first and immediately expresses disatisfaction at how it has been stamped, flashing the pages at a young official who nervously re-checks it for her.

Miraculously, 20 minutes later our passports are back and we're back on the bus, no money having been demanded and no possessions having been relieved from our persons. It becomes apparent that scary woman is looking after us. When we change buses in Vinh, she jabs her finger at the correct bus and has a shouting match with the driver on our behalf. The Hanoi bus leaves without incident.

The bus should take 6 hours, but instead it takes 9. The journey is interrupted by various stops; to onload and offload bags of concrete, to allow the men to piss at the side of the road (I guess that women have to hold it or squat) and to do a small amount of welding on the wheels of the bus.

We arrive exhausted in Hanoi at 10:30 and grab a highly inflated cab to the town centre. I check into my hostel and call Stu, who shows up on his scooter and whisks me away for a drink.

When I talk to the hostel owner in the morning, he asks if I had any trouble on the route. Apparantly a group of tourists on the bus two days previously were marched off it and watched terrified as the driver drove away with all their possessions and left them in the middle of nowhere. I tell him no; we were lucky enough to have a terrifying nutter woman on board.