25 Hours in an Overcrowded Vietnamese Sleeper Bus
Leaving the mountains of Sa Pa for the beaches of Da Nang.
Budget sleeper buses are no joke in Vietnam. You go to a shady-looking website, pay $10 or $12 USD, and get a PDF ticket taking you anywhere you want to go within the country. Sounds like a pretty good deal, right?
It’s a great one, until it suddenly isn’t.
The biggest problem with these cross-country sleeper bus companies is they’re not run like real businesses. Your ticket just tells you to go wait on some random street corner somewhere, or go into an unmarked building and wait and wait until the bus does (or doesn’t) show up.
When it finally does arrive you quickly find out whether you got lucky or not. The type of bus you book on your ticket is largely meaningless in Vietnam.
We booked a cabin sleeper from the mountains of Sa Pa down to Da Nang in the central region of the country, and in our Western minds that was exactly what we were going to get. If not, people surely would’ve complained. But this isn’t the West, it’s Vietnam, and that’s not how things work here.
On the first leg of the journey (Sa Pa to Hanoi), we got exactly what we paid: a large, spacious cabin with an outlet and blackout curtains. And it was very comfortable. We both slept most of the way to the capital.
Then one of the workers came by, shouted, “Get up!” and sent us out onto the side of the road in Hanoi with nothing more than a loose gesture toward the transfer area. They were in such a hurry to return to the road that we had to rush after them to even get our bags off the bus. Five more seconds and we’d be without clothes right now.
This is just the way things are here in Vietnam. Everything is chaotic and feels like it’s not going to work, yet somehow it almost always does. Embracing this truth is the key to a happy life in this beautiful country.
But it’s not always easy. When you’re wandering through the streets of some random neighborhood in Hanoi, having not slept all night (yay for working American hours in Asia), have no idea where you’re going or if it’s even a place that exists, it’s easy to get discouraged and begin to wonder if it’s worth it.
Then you find the bus, but it’s not the right kind. You don’t have a cabin, just a bunk, a bunk that’s three feet shorter than you are. But it’s fine. It’s fine, right?
Then the old Portuguese lady sitting behind you starts coughing. Every thirty seconds another fit breaks out. Is she sick? Is it the pollution? You have no idea, but the back of your neck is wet.
Then comes the water. The ceiling is leaking. Drip, drip, drip. Your glasses are stained and blurry. After an hour of this, you finally manage to fall asleep, but wake up soaking wet a few miles outside of Hue.
You’re miserable throughout the entire 25 hours, but every time you look outside you see something so beautiful it takes your breath away
An endless lake you’ll never know the name of, misting mountains leading up into the heavens, some random grandma selling banh mis on the side of the road. Then you pull into Da Nang and see the beach for the first time and you understand.
Vietnam is a magical place, and a frustrating one, too.
I wouldn’t have it any other way.
