Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
It had the shape of a school bus, with the engine in front under a snout hood, and it
was wheezing the way I remember the school buses of my youth used to do. It's possible
the bus was that old, though it had a bright red and yellow paint job and the insignia of
the local province—Quang Tri—tattooed on the driver's-side door.
I was excited and leapt out into the road to hail it, though it was going only about ten
miles per hour as it labored up the rutted hill, and it was stopping, anyway. It coughed
to a halt, and, having learned that Western courtesy was unnecessary, I raced inside the
hut, bursting through both beaded curtains to the bedroom. I roused Albert—“There's
a bus, there's a bus, wake up!”—and raced back outside, where the front door of the bus
was open, the driver was standing outside, and a few passengers were getting off.
Suddenly, from out of nowhere, it seemed, a small man, agile as a monkey, scampered
up on top of the bus, where he unfastened a few ragged suitcases and wicker baskets
from a roof rack and tossed them down to the driver. He spotted me with my bicycle and
stayed up there, gesturing; the driver took my bike from me—snatched it, actually—and
in one motion slung it to the guy on the roof, who tied it down with an expert's ease.
By that time Albert had emerged from the hut, blinking, groggy, and docile, and
without a word or, apparently, a thought to his bicycle (which I fetched and gave to the
driver), got on the bus. His bike followed mine, and I followed him.
The bus was a scene, crowded and noisy and rank. People were carrying odd baggage
on their laps—baskets crammed with I don't know what, pots and pans, battered suit-
cases with straining seams—and there were several live animals, including a few chick-
ens, a dog, and a goat. (Nary an armadillo.)
There was a brief lull in the cacophony when Albert and I got on as the other passen-
gers registered the presence of aliens. They seemed to have a sense that Albert, a stocky
man who probably weighed as much as any two of them, needed his space, and they left
a double seat open for him. He immediately sprawled out and closed his eyes. I sat in the
seat behind him, next to a quiet man who smiled at me shyly and offered me the window,
and we switched places.
The bus jounced and ground along for a solid three hours, partly on exposed mountain-
side—I tried unsuccessfully to ban bus-plunge thoughts from my head—partly in the
jungle where everything seemed just a little wilted and bleached in the heat. It stopped
frequently, at every tiny village, where people got off with their suitcases and their
chickens, and each time, the monkey man jumped up on the roof and slung down be-
longings. More than once we crossed a streambed by simply driving through the stream,
and once we stopped beside a pond, and several of the passengers waded in to cool of
