Monday 2 July 2012

A Brian Rix farce?

Saturday 30 June


I'm up at 5.00 am, to make sure I'm ready to catch the 7 am bus to Phnom Penh, Cambodia.  Reg sleeps on for a bit as it never takes him long to get ready.  I've packed my clean washing, so relieved to have it back late last night, and leave Reg's ready for him to pack this morning.

Sing, the day receptionist at the hotel, told us on Thursday when we arrived in Saigon that the bus for Phnom Penh will collect us from our hotel, any time after 6.30 am today.  We have our breakfast, and are sitting in the hotel lobby at 6.30 am, waiting for the bus to arrive.

We wait; and wait.  The clock creeps past 7 am and I think I'll just check with the helpful night receptionist (the one who motorbiked right across town to retrieve my laundry late yesterday evening).

As I approach the desk, he's already on the phone; it seems he thinks it strange too that the bus hasn't arrived yet.  It turns out that we were meant to catch the bus at a tour office a couple of streets away; but Sing told us that the bus would pick us up at our hotel.

By this time I'd already tipped the night receptionist for his sterling work in retrieving my washing, so he's going out of his way to help us.

"Sing forgot to ask the bus to collect you from the hotel,  When you weren't at the tour office pick up point, it went without you.  Don't worry, I've asked the bus to come back for you," he says.  "Everything will be ok."


I tell Reg a bus would never turn around and come back for anyone back home; Reg agrees, but this is Vietnam.  At 7.30 pm, still no sign of the bus; so it seems it was too good to be true, after all.

There is a bus at 8.00 am, but we, on Sing's advice, had opted for the earlier one.  At this point we still think that the bus is coming back for us, especially when the helpful night receptionist says,

"You need to get to tour office quickly. We pay for taxi  to tour office -you no pay.  Bus will pick you up there in few minutes."  He indicates to one of the young workers at the hotel.  "He will follow the taxi on motorbike, to pay taxi and make sure you get on bus.  Don't worry."


We are bundled with all our luggage into a taxi and taken to the tour office a couple of roads away.   At this point the procedure turns into a Brian Rix farce (apologies to anyone not old enough to remember Brian Rix).

The young lad on the motorbike, who's come to pay the taxi and make sure we catch the bus in the right place, can only pay the taxi with a large note, but the taxi driver is fuming because he has no change - we've only driven a couple of streets, after all.  The young lad goes off to get change.  Meanwhile a coach with Phnom Penh written on it draws up where we are waiting with our luggage, opposite the tourist office.  We show the driver's mate the receipt Sing gave us for the journey and he  helps us to put our luggage in the compartment underneath the bus, and indicates to us to get on the coach.  Reg and I settle down in the seat numbers which Sing has written on our hotel receipt.

The coach doesn't move though, and suddenly our night receptionist clambers onto the coach, breathless and agitated.

"Sorry! Sorry!  Please get off.  This is not your bus!  Sorry!"


Reg and I can see the funny side of this and I try hard to quell laughter which is trying to burst forth.  We get off and our luggage is taken off the coach; it appears that the driver realised we were on the wrong coach and phoned the hotel, getting the telephone number from our receipt.

We follow the hotel night receptionist across the road to the tour office with our luggage, and are asked to sit down and wait. The night receptionist apologises, but he has to get back to the hotel, says goodbye, and tells us that the tour office receptionist will let us know when our coach arrives.  This is about 7.45 am, and we assume at this point that we must be catching the 8 am bus. The staff in the tour office are very sympathetic about what has happened, and say that the bus won't be long.  We don't think the bus we should have caught was ever going to come back for us, but the night receptionist seemed afraid to tell us that fact.

No 8 o'oclock bus arrives to pick us up.  Every time we ask what's happening, the tour office receptionist tells us that the bus won't be long.

All in all we wait from 6.30 am until 9.00 am for our bus to Cambodia,  Every cloud has a silver lining though; while waiting, the lovely Swiss couple with whom we chatted for a whole evening on the luxury junk in Halong Bay nearly 2 weeks ago, walk into the tour office while we are waiting.  We are so pleased to see them, because we hadn't had a chance to say goodbye to them properly.  The young Swiss man says he and his partner have got on so well he thinks this is a forever relationship.  His partner blushes and smiles happily.  We catch up on what we've each been doing since we last met - they aren't going to Phom Penh though, so we say our proper goodbyes and go our separate ways.

Once on the bus, Reg and I reflect that we wouldn't like to be in Sing's shoes when she does her changeover with the night receptionist this morning.

Obtaining our Cambodian visas at the Vietnam/Cambodian border goes smoothly; the coach driver's mate is really helpful, and does it all for us; we aren't overcharged as we feared we might be.

We take a tuk tuk (a motorcyclist pulling a little covered carriage) to our hotel; these are much more readily available in Phnom Penh than taxis, although it is a bit of a squeeze to with all our luggage.  On arriving at the hotel, we only find that due to a mix up with dates on our part we aren't booked in until tomorrow.  The hotel are really helpful though, and find us another, slightly more expensive hotel, just for the one night; we'll return to our original hotel tomorrow morning.

We knew we should have stayed in Saigon for an extra day.





































































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