We celebrated my birthday the night before the actual day, as we had planned to get a bus to Vietnam at 7am the day after, and there was no way I would be able to get up and get on that bus after a night out.  However, after thinking about it, we decided to change this plan to catch the overnight bus the night before, so that we didn’t lose a day travelling. I was up for this idea, after all I’d rather just get on with it and sleep on the bus than have to face getting up at 5am and not sleeping on the bus.

Or so I thought.

We’d spent the day fairly relaxed. We’d decided not to go back to Angkor, we were too templed out and I was keen to have a bit of down time on my birthday. It turned out we would have been far too hungover to make it to Angkor anyway! After a long lie in and a lengthy brunch, we headed to get a massage. It wasn’t a relaxing massage, it was a pretty brutal Cambodian massage but I really needed to be twisted, pulled and clicked into shape after too many hours spent cramped on a plane seat or stiff with terror in the back of a taxi. It was bliss.

We’d booked the “luxury overnight soft sleeper” bus that set off at midnight. We whiled the evening away with a relaxed dinner and a couple of drinks – although I was still hungover and absolutely shattered so it wasn’t the most comfortable few hours of my life. Heading back to the hostel, we chilled out in the front area reading, our bags ready for us to be picked up.  It was a monsoon outside… and I’d left my lovely boat shoes out there.

The minibus that would take us to the big bus turned up late. Clambering on board, my shoes quite literally slopping, my newly-purchased Cambodian trousers rolled up, I settled in for at least a 15 minute journey.

More like 15 seconds. The bus pulled out the end of our street, turned left and stopped. The whole bus laughed at the fact that we’d been picked up for that. Ah well. I slopped out, climbed on the big bus and we settled in, in front of a German couple and behind a young Korean lad.  I whipped my shoes off and stuck some socks on in an attempt to dry out and warm up my feet.

As we took all our valuables down and wrapped the bags / pouches around us in a way that they couldn’t be touched without us knowing, a young German woman got on board in tears.  Turns out she was off to Laos, and had no idea why she was being forced to head south to Phnom Penh first when she needed to go north. She was travelling on her own and I felt desperately sorry for her – at the mercy of whatever information the travel company would give her.

Just as we were about to pull off, a seemingly very drunk Australian man stumbled on board. Heading straight to the back seat, he kicked off a bit of a fuss by trying all the seats around him, trying to get the couple behind us to move their bag off one of the spare seats and making lots of noise. The German girl moved up the bus to a seat that wasn’t broken, and to be honest I was more preoccupied with the fact that I’d had to relinquish one of my socks to plug up the broken air conditioner above OHs head. Luxury travel this wasn’t.

We quickly tried to nod off, putting the seats back, curling up and trying to stay warm.  After about half an hour we got woken by the Oz guy shouting “Where’s my girl? Where’s my girlfriend?” to which I could hear blurry replies about how he’d got on the bus on his own. He started wandering up and down the bus, seemingly looking at every seat for his girlfriend. Tired and grumpy, I drifted off to sleep again to the sounds of drunken stumbling.

I awoke a couple of times over the next hour or so to find this guy standing next to me staring over us. I was pretty freaked out. I moved around to show I was awake but didn’t really want to make eye contact. I just wanted him to leave us alone.  I was also freaking out by the speed the bus was going at. It was flying, at points feeling like it was taking off the road.  The memories of the reviews I’d read came flooding back – why didn’t we think about the horrible and dangerous things we’d heard about the night bus that pushed us into getting a taxi on the way up?!

I next woke up to see the Australian guy sat on the seat in front. Staring forward, I noticed him leaning over the guy next to him – the young Korean man.  In my dazed and confused state I cycled through the possibilities of what he could be doing – looking for his girlfriend?! Looking for a lighter?! Stealing?? The last idea was clearly the right one and just as I was about to shout out to ask what he was doing or wake the other guy up, he woke.  Clearly scared and freaked out, he looked across before instantly checking all his valuables.

To sleep again. Lightly.

Awake again. Not lightly.

We woke to find a not small Cambodian man storming down the back of the bus, shouting. Wide awake, we turned around to see him grabbing the Australian guy in his seat 2 places behind us by the scruff of the neck.  Shouting protestations, but not even trying to hit the guy back, the Australian seemed very scared. But strangely, not very drunk anymore. The Cambodian reached down under the seat in front of him and grabbed a pile of Cambodian Riels, the local currency.  He shoved the guy in a seat on his own, opposite the aisle to the German couple and just to the behind-right of me.  Marching back up the bus, he shouted to his child to check their belongings, a task we were all busy undertaking.

We were lucky. Nothing seemed to be missing, but we had been very careful with our stuff and I’m a very light sleeper.

What happened over the next hour still seems beyond belief. The (by now very angry) Cambodian came storming back down the bus, where he proceeded to punch the Australian repeatedly, at one point even fly kicking him. I was pretty freaked by this point, and both us and the German couple were sheltering in our seats to save ourselves from raining blows. The Australian wasn’t fighting back, just crying and shouting that he didn’t need to steal, he had $50 on him (which soon went up to $100, and even $200).  He was told to sit down, shut up and stay still, and we advised him to do this unless he wanted his head kicked in.  He still proceeded to whimper and cry, and moan about how he was going to end up dying in a Cambodian prison. I didn’t have much sympathy for him, he had clearly been thieving and he deserved to be punished for it.  The guy behind me had a bit more patience and sympathy for him, telling him that it would be ok, and he just needed to stay quiet and not antagonise the bus anymore. I was getting particularly wound up by the fact that he kept asking us to go up the bus, talk to the rest of the passengers and tell them he had been sat quietly in his seat all night – a clear lie.

At times he kept opening the window and saying he was going to jump out. I didn’t believe him and had little time for it. The guy behind was trying to talk him out of it, and I just turned around at one point, with a raised voice and told him that he was an idiot and would kill himself.

“I’m gonna die anyway in a Cambodian jail, what difference does it make?” came his ridiculous reply.

“The difference is we’ve all had to put up with you the whole way, and none of us want to spend the rest of the night picking your body parts off a Cambodian highway” I responded angrily.

This carried on for quite a while. The road was pitch black, we were travelling at considerable speed and the road was busy with people who simply don’t slow down for anything. He wouldn’t stand a chance!

Unbelievably, he went for it. Even more unbelievably, he did it not at the point where the bus was almost at a standstill, but a few minutes later when the bus was accelerating at considerable speed.  I looked over to see a hand gripping onto the windowsill, quite literally like something out of a movie.

“STOP!!!” we screamed. “He’s jumped out the window!”

The bus pulled to a halt and the driver and quite a few of the locals jumped out.  I honestly thought they had no chance of finding him until a few minutes later he was frogmarched back on the bus and sat near the front.  The last we heard, he was trying to pay off the guy who had caught him stealing, a move that I suspect was successful.

This drama had filled up the time to Phnom Penh and our change of bus.  So, at about 6am, we traipsed off the bus and waited for the next one on to Ho Chi Minh City.

I won’t go into detail about the next lengthy journey. The bus was old, uncomfortable and hot.  It went on for about 7 hours, including a lengthy and confusing crossing into Vietnam.

But I will tell you about the last half hour.  I’d slept a bit more, woken up feeling horrific. I get sick when I don’t have enough sleep and I was pretty dehydrated. I’d scoffed down most of a bag of crisps in an attempt to get some salt into my system.  It backfired in the last couple of miles of the journey when I suddenly got very, very nauseous. Shouting at OH that I was going to be sick and asking what the hell I should do about it, he grabbed the empty crisp packet with seconds to spare. I threw my guts up as quickly and quietly as possible, and surprisingly no-one on the bus seemed to look up.

It gets worse.

We got off the bus and tried to figure out where we were. We’d read that buses normally drop off on the same street as our hostel, and whilst trying to avoid the drivers trying to get us on their bikes, we tried to figure out where we were. In the end a couple of girls who had been on the bus grabbed us and told us they were going to the same area and we could share a taxi. Perfect. Except in my hand I was gripping the sick-filled crisp bag. Cringe.

So, I sat in the back of the taxi, feeling like death, smelling, and with a crisp bag full of sick in my hands.

Lovely.

CatDog xx