This week began with us travelling to the field site in yen bai province for the first time by ourselves.
We were given the time to get the bus ad knew how to get to the station to take it from.
An easy task, one would expect. However, expecting there to be only one bus to yen bai, we asked the ticket lady for tickets and she directed us to a bus scheduled to leave 30minutes before the time we were told.
Seems a little odd, I thought, but maybe its just running early. We were ushered onto the bus.
The bus was a different colour then we were told it would be, a sure sign something not all together correct was afoot maybe, but coming from ireland where buses to galway go the one route to galway and buses to dublin go to dublin, i still thought it must be correct.
Aboard the bus i decided to call our field supervisor in the field site. Indeed, my suspicions were confirmed, it was not quite the right bus. While it was travelling to yenbai, it was taking a different route and would not be going past our village.
I decided the best course of action was to show on google maps where we wanted to go to the bus driver. When he saw where he looked a little flustered and shook his head. He passed my phone to his attendant and he smiled and i sat their waiting, unsure. However the attendant then returned my phone to me and gave me a thumbs up, signalling that things would be ok.
I went back to my seat and before i knew it the attendant was telling me id be getting off at the next stop. The next stop was a highway overlooking a small road into a village that was unknown to me.
Not being sure where he had dropped us, i sent a snap to my field supervisor, but he didnt know, either. With both our phone batteries and the suns light dying, it wasnt looking the best for us..
We opted to head into the village to find a taxi, wherever we were, it couldnt be too far from our target, right?
As we made our way down the dirt path leading from the motorway, we heard a voice call out to us from the very first house we came across.
Not being sure what was being said to us, “taxi”? we both said, showing our intent.
The man pointed at some chairs to sit down on and offered us tobacco, I showed him where we needed to go and he went inside, a few minutes later a taxi showed up and we were both relieved to find that this is the neighbouring village to where we needed to be, finally we got to our target, albeit a small 3 hours later than expected..
Lesson learnt, get the right colour bus.
Or so i thought. Coming home a week later the bus turned out to be red, but the ticket lady was adamant it was correct so i got on anyway. Luckily for me, this time it was.