November 30, 2016
Calamity Steph
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THERE were two ways to come home from the elephants. The less adventurous sat in the bus that delivered us. The romantic bumped along the dirt road on the back of an open truck.
It was on getting off the truck that Steph missed a step and fell on her wrist. It hurt. It hurt a lot, more than a sprain. Riding was out of the question.
It took a lot of thinking and planning and the outcome is that we have been forced to take a series of buses into Vietnam and then north on an overnight train to Hanoi, the capital. There we will do the tourist things we expected to do at the end of the ride and see how Steph recovers. If she does, we can ride south rather than north. But it has ruled out the Ho Chi Minh trail.
There is one train line in Vietnam, the so-called Reunification Line which connects the once separate states of north and south Vietnam. There are no trains at all in Cambodia apart from the short, rickety "bamboo line" that's novel rather than useful. The Vietnamese line runs up the coastal plain between Saigon and Hanoi.
On the other hand, there are mini-bus services everywhere. They're advertised in the street in tourist places and any hostel owner can find one if they're not. At one end are buses that make bucolic excursions to deliver not just people but parcels, car tyres and, should the need be, chickens. At the other end are air-conditioned mini-coaches driven by Ben Hur, accelerating and braking through towns and villages with horns blasting in the hope of packing in one more body.
The driver sits where you'd expect, whipping the horses and competing with rivals. His shotgun partner sits on a plastic chair by the door. He flings open the door at the sight of pedestrians, some of whom want only to cross the road, and demand they abandon their plans and step in the bus instead. There's no grace: they're given orders and, when they decline, the door slides shut and the driver accelerates again. The bus hasn't even stopped.
We travelled on the whole range, one to the border (the bucolic ride) and two beyond it to reach a city on the coast. I'm sure we were overcharged every time, which is why experienced backpackers buy tickets from a counter rather than on the bus. But the price is small enough.
We have seen motorbikes on these buses so two touring bikes were never a problem. Sometimes they went on the roof, twice in the luggage area behind the back doors.
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The buses have introduced us to backpacking. It always seemed romantic, an alternative to cycling if I needed one. But now the limitations are clear. Backpackers are interested only in their destination. It can't be otherwise. Where on a bike we stop and talk, feel the breeze, hear the sounds, smell the perfumes, they are crammed into narrow seats and bounced past everything that to us is the point of travelling.
Nobody shouted "What's your name?" or "How are you?" No kids ran beside us. Nobody took our pictures or proffered their children. And nobody but touts showed any interest when we stepped off the bus. Why should they? A bus delivered its quota of western tourists every hour.
To be honest, I was disappointed. I'd always thought it would be romantic. Now I see that, like long-distance motorbiking and caravaning, it's an illusion. The buggerations are greater than the benefits.
Tonight we are in a hotel nowhere in particular other than that it has a station. We are here with an American travelling by train and an Englishman, a former miner with the strongest Sunderland accent I've heard in decades. Tomorrow we will investigate the train. There are soft sleepers with four bunks and hard sleepers with six. The bike costs a little extra and, we're told, usually arrives the following day.
We have yet to test all this but I'll pass it on when we do.
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