Xe Buýt: The Bus

I took the public bus to my lesson today. Saigon has an extensive bus system, with over 100 routes. The map of bus routes bears a striking resemblance to the city's haphazard tangles of electric cables. You're never quite sure where you'll end up when you step onto one of these buses for the first time. Not to mention, in order to actually step onto a bus, you will need a running start.

The first step is figuring out how to get where you want to go. I flipped back and forth between the city bus map and Goggle maps. After a while, I was sure I wanted the 6, heading northeast. The 6 takes me to District 2, across the bridge and over the flat barges that cruise down the sinuous Saigon River.

I skimmed the bus website to find the schedule, but there doesn't seem to be any. That's alright though. From what I can tell, the buses arrive every 10 minutes or so.

I found the nearby bus stop. It was not yet nine o'clock, and the business folks were not yet in the offices. They were on the sidewalk, sipping their breakfast coffees. They wore collared shirts or business dresses, sat on squat plastic stools, and rammed spoons into tall glasses to stir their icy brown cà phê sữa đá. They held morning conversations that were lost under the din of endless scooter engines, honking horns, and the general breath of the city.

The bus stop overhang arched forward, but did little to shade the waiting people from the morning sun. When I got there, three people sat on a bench fashioned from a set of chrome pipes. They ache to sit upon. I have found, during my travels, that bus benches in Asia are not designed for comfort. The bus stop seats in Singapore were a marginal four inches wide. Those were an extravagance compared to Hong Kong, where there were no bus stop seats to be found anywhere.

Xe Buýt

A bright green bus approached. One of the people at the stop stood and waved. She looked like she was patting the head of a child. The driver of the bus took it as a sign to pull over. The bus muscled past a swath of scooters to get to the curb, slowed to a crawl, and opened its doors--still rolling. The woman who had waved took a few steps in high heels, matched the speed of the bus, grabbed the rail inside and leapt in. The bus never stopped.

When my bus arrived, I was prepared to have to jump on as well. But the bus pulled over and stopped, and a half-dozen people pushed their way through the doors. As soon as the last person was off, the bus started to pull away again. I snatched the rail, jumped, and found myself onboard and en route. I found an empty seat in the back, next to a window. The seats were old nagahide and pleather, like a school-bus from the 1980s. The paint on the rails was worn off by countless hands. I slung my guitar off my shoulders, sat down, and set it between my knees.

A ticketperson in a blue uniform approached me, one hand full of ticket vouchers, the other with a wad of cash. No words were spoken. I handed over a 10,000 note, and she tossed me a blue ticket and 6,000₫ in change. That's roughly 20 cents. I think New York buses may be close to $3 by now.

I settled in to view the city from the bus window. We passed shophouses, corner stalls, more beverage vendors with crowds of business-folks on their plastic stools, stirring their condensed milk into their iced coffees. We passed flashing neon lights in electronic stores, vegetable and fruit carts with hand drawn prices by the kilo, steaming noodle shops, grimy repairmen, scooter drivers barefoot and passed out on their bikes. We passed dealerships and markets, endless scooters and bicycles, narrow alleys and cross streets stretching off into the distance with more of everything. And we passed throngs of people--in the streets, on the sidewalks, strolling about, squatting, shopping, selling, laughing, bargaining, arguing, shoveling, urinating, pedaling, carrying, moving, living, being. The city has no limit. It's as if one could see anything on the Saigon bus.

As the bus rumbled through the streets, I sat gazing at everything, at nothing. But I noticed a taxi driver, pulled over to the curb across the street. He had glanced up from the driver's seat and looked in the direction of my bus. At the sight of me, his head jerked back, his eyes widened, and a smile slowly spread across his face, as if to say, no freaking way. He probably thinks you can see anything on the Saigon bus, too.