The trip from Da Lat to Kien Duc started out fine.
But it didn’t stay that way…
We had booked seats on a van, with the help of the guy who runs the hostel we stayed at in Da Lat. It was going to be a five hour drive from Da Lat to Kien Duc.
The van picked us up at the hostel, about an hour later than the scheduled time. We got settled in the back. There was a driver, and a conductor.
The van picked up a couple more people around town, then hit the highway. It had started to rain, and the driver was going at a reasonable speed. So far, so good.
One of the other passengers started playing some loud dance music on his phone, so the driver turned on the van’s sound system to drown out the guy’s phone and make him stop playing his music. That was pretty funny.
We headed farther into the mountains, picking up people — and packages — along the way.
The van filled up with people, and things. Almost all of the seats were occupied, and we had lots of sacks and boxes — plus a full-size gasoline-powered lawn trimmer — onboard.
About two and a half hours into the trip, we stopped at a small snack shop for a break. Up until then nobody had smoked onboard, so nearly all of the other passengers, the driver, and the conductor enjoyed a smoke.
Our van got a new driver, but we kept the same conductor.
For the next part of the trip, the highway gave way to small roads with no marked lanes. The going was pretty rough, very twisty turny, and it went on like that for a long, long time.
The new driver was going very fast on the tiny mountain roads. It was a miracle he didn’t hit anyone — though he came pretty close to hitting some kids, and then a dog.
When we were finally about an hour from our destination, the conductor came back to collect our fares.
We had had our hostel friend in Da Lat verify everything before we left, so we knew exactly how much the fare was.
But the conductor tried to charge us a higher price.
So I handed him the correct amount. He indicated that he wanted more. I typed the amount on my phone’s calculator to show him I knew the fare. He said more.
I guess they say that it’s easier to just pay more, and avoid the possibility of a confrontation. But I was so fed up with the van, the unsafe driving — and I knew I was right about the fare.
So I looked him in the eye, and simply said, “No.”
He went back to the front of the van, and that was that.
We finally arrived in Kien Duc. The conductor had the driver stop about four blocks short of where he was supposed to drop us off.
Update: I guess there were no hard feelings, though. Two weeks later we saw that van go by at its regular time, while we were walking up the street, and they honked the horn and waved at us.
But I had already plotted a different way to get out of town, so we wouldn’t be going with them again.