On trains and bus

Vietnam Truck

Travelling overland in Asia is not joke.
You can choose between 5 kinds of train ticket, 6 if you consider the luxury options, but I do not.


  1. Soft seats

    • with air conditioning: actually like our new European train, the bus-type one, with no compartments, not fully reclinabled, supposed to be modern and more confortable but at the end nothing to compare with the old compartment trains, a world in their own

    • without air conditioning: as above, but older. The seat is sofá like, the ass will seat on something that was soft ages ago, the backrest is woven bambú


  2. Hard seats: no compartment train with wooden bench instead of seats. Sleeping on the floor would be more confortable if Asian people would have not the slighlty annoying habit of spitting

  3. Soft sleepers: a closed compartment with 4 beds, the two on the lower benchs used a seats during the day. Confortable, nothing to object. Spent all my transiberian trio in one of them; no, I do not mean generically, I just mean the same one for a few days. Anyway, the best option, better to get the upper bench, so people will not put their ass where you should sleep

  4. Hard sleepers: an open compartment with 6 beds arranged in 3 bunks; the lower bench is used as seats during the day; the upper bench is used could be used as a coffin: space between my nose and the roof was not enough to sneeze; great to know people: being open the full car is like a big compartment; if you can get a middle bench it is ok, otherwise I hope you like people socializing on your bed (lower bench) or you are not claustrophobic (upper bench)

  5. Standing: should I explain this one?


As I am always late in getting tickets, I refused the expensive offer of an agency for a soft seat with A/C, so I went to the train station and I had to take a soft seat with no A/C to Sapa. I did not know yet what a soft seat without A/C was like, I jumped at it: I hate A/C and it was a lot cheaper then the one offered to me by the agency. My ass is still thanking me. And it was a return ticket too!
There are other ways to move of course. Bus is the other cheapest options. Again, distance are not what we have in Europe. Just to give an idea, a man in Olkhom island told me he was lucky because he could live so near his family; when I asked where his family was, he told me just 3 hours of bus away.
Anyway, in order to cover such long distance, they have two kind of bus:

  1. seating bus: as any bus we are used to in Europe, but sometimes they sell standing place

  2. sleeping bus: instead of 2 row of seats, you have 3 rows of bunk beds. In Vietnam there are 2 benchs for bunk, in china sometimes there are 3, so the upper bench got a new problem other than the ones on hard sleepers train: nose is in danger to be broken with each road pothole, and there are many. Also the seat is not full reclinable, so you are bent at 30 degree.


Apart for the TV set constantly showing old Holliwood or new Honk Kong movies with no audio and vietnamese/chinese subtitles (strange enough, actor voices cannot be heard, but shooting and explosions are always at full volume), there is another source of amusement on the bus, especially for the passengers at the front seats: drivers drives like they firmly believe in reincarnation and they more strongly believe them souls are going to migrate in a superior form of life. Or in vegetative coma.
And they also strongly believe that high decibel horns will gain them some more points in jumping the queue at Nirvana.
As I am open to new and exciting experience, I decided to get the first upper bench on driver’s side.
So each time a minor overtake of a moped was done, I was woken up from my bent sleep by a poliphonic concert for horns and beepers (the moped). Sometimes instead was not the horns to wake me up, but the high beams of the incoming vehicle, that could be another bus, a huge track or an unlucky car. In such a case, the horns were blasted before to announce the danger of collision, then a second time to decide who has right of way (probably the one with more offending noise power), then a third time to celebrate the missed collision.
In the background a bunch of travellers of different nationalities were either praying different gods or calling different names to the previous incarnations of the driver.
In such a company I did the last trip from Hanoi to Hue. And I am not reincarnated yet.

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