The next day we had to wait until the evening to be picked up from our hotel so we walked through the city some more, spending more time in shops, admiring Vietnamese skillfulness in handicrafts. It is amazing how little money one would need to furnish their whole house and supply it with beautiful artwork here in Vietnam.
The day flew by and it was time to get back to the hotel and wait for a van to pick us up and take us to the Open Tour bus station. Our Open Tour started with problems already while we were waiting at the hotel to be picked up. There we received our tickets from the hotel staff and after I inspected them I found that what I held in my hands were one way tickets only. We told this to the hotel receptionist and she called somewhere and assured us that correct tickets would be brought to us by the pickup. In fact we received 4 replacement tickets just before we boarded the bus, not from the driver who picked us up at the hotel. Each ticket in fact contained several tickets that we would use to go from one stop on the way to another so that the passengers can break their journey and stay in interesting places as long as they want to. All our four tickets contained the same pages containing tickets in downwards direction only. I thought that that was simply how they do it here to save printing too many different pages so they just don’t bother having tickets printed for each direction separately. As we learned a few days later we were actually going to have a problem awaiting us on our way back.
After the first 12-hour overnight leg from Hanoi to Hue we were to experience the first major hiccup… They told us to get off the bus in Hue and only because we were wary and for all cases took everything out of the bus with us we didn’t loose anything after the bus took off never to be seen again. The only thing the drivers told us was that a bus would come an hour later to continue the journey. When this bus didn’t show at that time and after all our fellow travelers and us started to inquire in the booking office about it. We were informed that no bus was coming and that we would have to find ourselves an accommodation and stay overnight. This was understandably received with “applause” and now the booking office clerks had a problem with a lot of tourists requesting to get what they paid for – another bus to continue in their journey south. The whole problem was that even the clerks didn’t know where the original bus disappeared. In the end they had to find a new bus with a new driver to drive us to Hoi An. For this leg of the journey we got a little better bus. I suppose that this bus might be the top class one for which you pay 60 bucks one way (as opposed to 30 bucks we paid). The difference is definitely not worth twice the price so at least our decision to pay for the middle class bus was good. On the other end of the choice spectrum, traveling on a small mini bus would be quite unbearable on these long legs I think.
On the way on the open tour you usually travel overnight and part of the day, and it usually works out that way that you have a few hours or half a day at the major cities. It was not how I imagined it to be however. We later learned that it was because what I thought was s Sinh Café operator named Open Tour was actually a completely different company altogether, only parasiting on Sinh Café’s good name.