Bus(es) from Cat Tien National Park to Ha Tien

Having arrived in Cat Tien and only then realised that heading to Ho Chi Minh City afterwards wasn’t the only option, we booked ourselves on a bus to Can Tho (in the Mekong Delta) through our homestay.

We had originally planned to get to Ho Chi Minh City with Sinh Tourist, then do a 30-minute taxi ride across town to the other bus station to then head on a sleeper bus to Ha Tien. But there were two problems with this – 1) the taxi would have cost more than the bus, and 2) the direct sleeper bus from HCMC to Ha Tien had sold out. Oops. We were unaware that the Friday before New Year was the big Vietnamese holiday getaway. Even the locals didn’t seem to know which days were public holidays and which not.

So instead we realised that from Can Tho (which meant avoiding HCMC) we could take a bus to Rach Gia and from there we could take a bus to Ha Tien. A bit annoying to have to change so many times but it was the only option left for us as we’d decided we didn’t want to spend nearly a week in HCMC, and because the weather still looked bad on the east coast (in Mui Ne specifically).

From Cat Tien to Can Tho

The bus from Cat Tien to Can Tho was our first experience with Thanh Buoi, and they definitely won the award for nicest smelling bus. It was the cleanest and most comfortable ride we had. They don’t speak English at all and their website won’t let you book in English so we would never have otherwise booked ourselves on this bus. But because the homestay organised it we didn’t need to worry about this. Whilst on the bus we got on merrily with smiles and pointing.

What we hadn’t realised (but luckily Googled upon whilst on the bus) is that included in your ticket (350,000d – 13.22 EUR) you also get transfers to your hotel. So we left Cat Tien at about 11am and arrived in Can Tho at about 6pm (an hour earlier than expected) and were politely shuffled onto a little mini bus which would take us to our hotel for the night.

12 hours of confusion in Can Tho

Cue the moment we thought we’d screwed up. We’d deliberately booked a hotel that was walking distance from the bus station we’d need at 6.30am the next morning. We had it all planned out. But it was way out of the centre of town and in an area where we definitely didn’t fit in. When we arrived in Can Tho Kim revealed that the bus the next morning would actually be leaving from the bus station we’d just arrived in, so we were doing two 30-minute rides for no reason to stay in a hotel in a rubbish location. We did not think this through.

When we arrived at the hotel we asked the guy on reception to book us a taxi for 5.30am the next morning, and showed him the bus ticket. With his non-existent English he tried to tell us (we think) that if we phone up the bus company they’ll pick us up. Right. We were kind of hoping you might do that, given that you have a phone and that you speak Vietnamese. So in the end we think he understood that this was too complicated and that we were willing to pay for a taxi.

We headed out for some dinner and after retreating due to yet more rain we ended up at the place on the corner which gave us a pretty tasty chilli roast chicken and some chopsticks. A whole chicken with chopsticks? We gave up after about 2 minutes and pulled it apart with our hands we were so hungry. This also resulted in me throwing soup all over the floor. We weren’t really winning that night.

From Can Tho to Rach Gia

The next morning we were up at 4.50am thanks to Kim’s leap to get away from the ‘something in the bed!’ and so we had plenty of time to get our taxi to the bus station. The taxi set off and about 5 minutes later stopped. So yes, we did have a plan and we should have stuck to it – the bus would be leaving from the bus station we originally thought, and we could have walked from the hotel. And we were now at the bus station an hour before it left.

Good job there was a friendly guy who’d worked for the American army during the war (that can’t have gone down well) and who sold us some much-needed coffee and  chatted to us in the English he’d learnt many years ago.

The bus we took from Rach Gia cost 140,000d (5.20 EUR), would take 4.5 hours and was with Futa – our first experience with these guys who seem to be the biggest in South Vietnam. We’d heard bad things so we were on our guard. When we arrived in Rach Gia almost an hour early we were a little suspicious. We got off the bus, retrieved our big bags, walked into the bus station office, got ignored a bit, then showed someone that we had a ticket to Ha Tien. They took us back outside and pointed at the bus we’d just got off. But now we didn’t have a seat and were standing with our big bags in the gangway. The journey to Ha Tien would take 2.5 hours. This time we also got our ticket taken off us so we had nothing to prove we’d paid for this trip. And we were technically on the wrong bus because our bus was supposed to leave at 11:10am.

From Rach Gia to Ha Tien

Thirty minutes into the standing bus ride we stopped at another bus station (still in Rach Gia). It was at this point that it dawned on us we were at the wrong bus station (again) and they’d just put us back on the same bus to get us to the correct bus station where buses to Ha Tien would leave from.

It looked like the first bus was still carrying onto the ferry terminal (there were a handful of French-speaking tourists heading to Phu Quoc) so when we realised this we grabbed our stuff in a hurry and got the driver to drop us at the station. The casualty of the day – Kim’s banh mi op la (fried egg sandwich) got left behind in the rush.

We realised we could probably try and get on the 10:10am to Ha Tien rather than wait till the 11:10am that we had booked (for 70,000d – 2.64 EUR). The lady in the ticket office in Rach Gia agreed and quickly issued us a new ticket for no extra cost and pointed in the direction of some buses. We were the last ones to board but pretty happy that we were on our way an hour earlier than expected and that things (with a heavy dollop of hindsight) started to make sense.

It might sound easy (buy a ticket and show up at the bus station) but on the ground it doesn’t seem to make as much sense as you would like. We did have email tickets after having booked on Baolau but they were all written in Vietnamese and it was hard to work out what was an address for the bus station and what was an address for the ticket office, bus station HQ etc. Add to that the fact that some of the map plotting on Google isn’t accurate and the limited English they speak on Futa and we felt like we were in or heading to the wrong place for most of the journey.

We arrived into Ha Tien at about 12pm and were again taken in a little mini bus right to the door of our hotel. It had felt like a 3-day camel ride but we’d finally got to the dry weather and the seaside where we’d stay for New Year.