Miranda & Toddie's World Tour: Oh how i wish for the X90 oxford bus!

With 3 countries, thousands of miles & numerous modes of transport under our belts we've started to feel accomplished in the art of backpacking. We can cope with the challenge & adversity of travel & find time to tell the tale......or so we thought!

The reason I say all this is because until recently we hadn't experienced the 'sleeper bus'!
(ed:get yourselves comfortable for a visualisation encounter...)
Now, imagine going to the dentist already tired & irritable from a lack of sleep. Now, slip into the vinyl chair & recline the angle to the point where your backside becomes numb, but imagine your back is now sharing the agony! Now, lower the ceiling til about 1ft from your face & shine the orthodontic light into your eyes & you are about half way towards the discomfort that we endured in the lower rearmost seats of the 'sleeper bus' from Hoi An to Nha Trang!

"Yes" it really is that bad & looking back at the Lonely Planets comments for this part of the trip we can agree on the quote "...this leg of the journey is often described as a prison like hell."

My original draft for this part of the blog was vetoéd by the ed as being too negative. However I felt I owed it to the archives to be truthful, no matter what & opted to just rework it later. Our journey from Saigon (HCM city) to Chau Doc (Vietnam/Cambodia boarder) provided the inspiration to do just that, since it could hardly be described as comfortable. Take a mini bus designed for 26 petite easteners & ask an average westener to take a seat and you will see an expression of discomfort in all but the most placid of faces. Ask a 6ft+ westener to contort into those same seats and the expression is more akin to those of a newby skydiver before exiting the aircraft @ 14,000ft! Consoling myself with the backseat, Miranda & I settled in for the 6 hour journey ahead. After leaving Saigon on roads with more craters than the surface of the moon we stopped & picked up a few more passengers, a motorbike (that was man-handled onto the roofrack) and a lady whose repetative kecking suggested she was about to lose a lung. Another few hours and we stopped again for yet more passengers to join our overloaded bus & watch our oasis of the back seat disappear. With the pins and needles of my legs turning to mild paralysis we stopped again for yet more passengers! Now totalling 38 in a bus for 26 I found myself with insufficent room to sit back in my own seat for fear of dislocating Miranda's shoulder or waking the gentle snoring, but pungent local to my right. As the warm dribble from my newly conjoined twin (ed:makes a change from mine!!) ran down my back and as the mobile phone of the passenger infront of me sparked into life & set off a chain reaction more akin to a new dance crave, I couldnt help but laugh & reflect on the irony of the situation, since I avoid buses like the plague at home. Yet here & now I would love to be on the X90 to Oxford as its clean & sweet smelling interior seems like luxury compared to this. (ed: I, on the otherhand, am still opting to return to comfy,heated seat cars and never use public transport again until im tooold toget a new license!!) To think we are on holiday only adds to the irony of the situation, but I couldnt help feeling we would be gaining more from this situation than DVT!

Firstly we learnt to really appreciate what we have a home already! Secondly, we've learnt that things are not always what they seem on the back-packers bus as the only seat you can be sure will remain your own whilst affording some leg room is the driving one! Thirdly, the 'Egyption pedal' (the horn) will be sounded at everything in, on or near the road, regardless of time or day! Finally we are not '' accomplished backpackers'' we are just travelling & waiting for the next exciting/scary ride!