Yep, I lost track of time. Yesterday was Sunday and not Monday, as I wrote. Today it’s Monday and it is travel day. That means getting up early (and I mean early!) and spending a day in the bus to Nha Trang.
I met a swiss couple in the bus, Christian and Arwen and also two young german ladies, Sylvia and Kathrin, with whom I spent the next two days.
In the end we were lucky to have taken the day trip and not the night trip. First we had much more space for us, everybody having two seats – what a luxury! And second I would have missed out a lot on the landscape and on people’s lives along the road. Though the distance between Hoi An and Nha Trang is not that much, it takes some time to get there (in our case we arrived at about 7 PM, after sunset, after about 12 hrs on the ride).
Along the road it was everything:
- endless plains with lush green rice fields, palm tree forests, then again mountains stretching all the way to the coast;
- blue sky with sunshine, and also clouds slowly crouching over the mountains
- Pupils in their school uniforms going to school early in the morning, having breakfast at stalls on the street and also pupils heading home again – same goes for working people of course.
- Vietnamese rush hours (thousands of bicycles and small motorbikes on the road) and quiet periods with little traffic
Unfortunately the bus took the short and quick route through one of the new tunnels here so we could not see one of the most famous passes here, that divides the northern and the southern part of Vietnam, at least weather-wise. What a pity, the view from there is said to be fantabulous – if you get to see it: in the evening we met some other people who made it up there and upon leaving the bus they were surrounded by 200 or so vending women, all trying to sell something.
In the end, we were glad to arrive in Nha Trang. The way it works here with the tourist buses is that they first take you to some hotel that is a „cooperation partner“, meaning it mostly pays commission to the bus company or being otherwise in the scheme here. Only if you had a look at their hotel and didn’t like it or if you have booked with some other hotel, they take you to the desired destination. And that’s already something I must admit. They also could say „Fine, folks, that’s it, end of the journey, have a nice stay, see you, good bye!“. I would suppose something like that would happen back at home, but here they really take you to your desired hotel in the end! And I guess it’s OK this way, since it also helps to keep transport prices low: I think I only paid 5 or 8 USD for the whole trip.