I woke up in the middle of the night having to go to the bathroom desperately, and after crawling over the sleeping bodies in the aisles, I managed to share my growing concern with the driver's assistant. Repeatedly, we stopped and I wasn't allowed off. Finally, we stopped to pick up a woman, and I dashed into the alley...never gone so fast in all my life! Another two women followed me, and we were back on the bus in a flash.
About 3:45 am, the bus stopped at a dark lot, and some people slowly unloaded their things. The driver turned the bus off, and we're all thinking that he must be taking another cigarette break. A half hour later, unable to fall asleep again and sweating from the lack of circulating air, someone asked the driver when we'd be off again, to which he replied that he was no longer driving that night. No, he wasn't being replaced...he was just done. He got a chair and some other Vietnamese joined him outside the bus, lying down in the street or smoking. We were stunned, and very out of it. As the morning light began to rise, we got off the bus to find some moving air, and realized we were in a dump, with other busses, nowhere conceivably near Hanoi. The driver laughed at our request to turn the air back on, and someone managed to get him to tell us, an hour later, that a local bus would come and pick us up. We got so sick of waiting, we paired up with an Israeli girl traveling alone and got a taxi back into town.
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