VIP bliss

As we planned our trip, we got advice to take an overnight VIP bus to Bangkok. Think deluxe, double decker charter bus with a hint of party. Since the regular buses are old and rickety, we thought this sounded like good advice for a bus we’d be riding in for 14 hours..definitely! It turned out to be even better than we imagined! Justin and I set off with Heidi and Su Jung, who are both headed home after the first wave, and departed at 4 pm on Saturday with the expectation of arriving in Bangkok at 5 am on Sunday.

 Heidi and Su Jung loving it up on the top deck

The seats were nice and cushy, we had hot pink fleece blankets and neck pillows, and they gave us water bottles and a box of little cookies. The A/C was on so high that we actually needed to use the blankets (a first for us since we’ve been in Thailand!) and made for a good sleeping climate.

One major downfall about our seats in particular was their location..we booked too late to be in the top, and our seats on the bottom level behind the driver, meaning we were basically staring at a wall the whole time. As soon as we started driving, the view of outside whooshing past us in our perifural vision made us carsick and I even had to take a Dramamine to make it through the first hour and a half of windy mountain jungle road—it was a miracle I could sleep through it! 

Isn't the decor stunning?

Our view for the ENTIRE 14 hour ride. Woo...

Another aspect of our drive that went from funny to annoying real fast was the blaring Thai pop music that went on continuously for about the first three hours of our ride. When the music finally stopped, they put on a seriously bloody and violent movie on that we figured must have been made in the U.S. but that we couldn’t understand because of the Thai they had dubbed over it. We were literally two feet away from the screen and couldn’t help but watch it, and near the end guessed it was probably rated R. We looked it up later and it was—gotta love that..not. The rest of the night was less confusing, gorey, and questionable, and we only had to kill a couple of mosquitoes and small bugs that we hoped weren’t cockroaches..what have we become that this type of situation doesn’t really phase us anymore?

We slept fairly well, only to be roused at 2 am at a rest stop where we were fed mushy rice and rubbery pork. Oh yum! We settled in and slept/waited to wake up in Bangkok!