China transportation Part 2: The Sleeper Bus

In this country, the train takes longer than the bus. So I bought an overnight bus ticket direct to the hong kong border crossing. I was told this is an efficient and comfortable way to travel – if only I could remember who gave me such horribly backwards information!

For some reason I expected a reading light and regularly small sized beds. But after boarding this retrofit bus with three rows of planks – narrower than my shoulders and from head to my mid calf in length I could tell this is local transport and any sort of light would be a longshot! I was lucky to get a top plank at the front so my legs could hang off and I wasn’t packed in like sardines on the bottom.

We left at 9:30pm and was tired after biking and glad to go to sleep when they shut off the lights. However it is quite difficult to sleep when the drivers BLARE – I mean volume cranked to the max – rave music about tequila. I was now wishing I had brought some drinks as it felt like a party bus. So if you could sleep through this, the horn going off at every turn would surely wake you up as the bus wound speedily along the construction site of a road. I also read somewhere that they had completed the highway in 2008 but I guess that was incorrect also. So I clung to the sides of my plank as the bus rattled and tipped between intervals of violent turbulence for 8 hours until I was woken up at 5 in the morning and forced out into the middle of nowhere! not at all where I was expecting.

but that’s another story………..