U-Pick: The Wheels on the Bus...*

As I've chronicled here before, Tiffany and I are very thrifty (read: cheap). If there's a deal to be had, we will have it. If it requires bargaining, that means I have to walk away and let Tiffany work her magic because I absolutely cannot haggle. Here's how I haggle:

"Oooh, what a pretty scarf!"

"$20."

"Okay."

But some deals are simply choices you make. And, when they turn out to be terrible, no-good, very bad choices, you can always return to that moment when you might have chosen something else. This is what we call self-torture. Here's a choice Tiffany and I made in Vietnam:

For maximum efficiency, we liked to travel at night and on trains. Although it took longer, it was cheaper than a plane and it meant we didn't have to pay for the cost of a hotel.

Then we discovered the overnight bus.

The man in Hanoi who helped us book our travel and let us use his bathroom and stand in front of his fans (when the electricity was working) told us an overnight train from Hanoi to Hue would cost us about $40 each. The overnight bus? $14.

Tiffany and I looked at each other, then at the picture of the overnight bus our travel agent held up. It showed a sleek traveling machine with two rows of seats that reclined fully. The seats had clean white pillows and blankets that had been turned down neatly.

"The drivers here..." Tiffany began, about to point out that the Vietnamese didn't seem to follow any discernible traffic laws. And we hadn't even seen a highway yet.

"I know," I said, "but we can save $25 bucks each! That's four nights in a hotel."

"Bus!" we told our friend, handing over the cash.

The bus didn't leave until 7 p.m. that night. We made our way to the proper street corner with a bag of fresh pineapple and two loaves of french bread to enjoy as we reclined.

"That's not our bus," I said as we arrived, eyeing a rickety-looking thing that was emitting frightening noises as it idled.

I tried to peer around the bus for the sleek traveling machine I'd seen in the picture. There were no other buses.

"That's not our bus, right?" I asked, my voice starting to rise.

Tiffany, sensing my panic, already had made herself calm and brave. This is one of many things I love about my girlfriend. At the time, of course, I had no appreciation for her stoicism.

"Tiffany," I pleaded, as other nervous-looking tourists began to board.

We got in line. I took one step up onto the bus and stopped. This bus didn't have two rows of spacious, sturdy seats. It had three rows of narrow, grimy looking seats. And each row had a top and bottom bunk.** My palms started to sweat.

Tiffany tried to nudge me on but my arms shot out and gripped the sides of the door. I literally could not move forward. The line of tourists started to back up behind us.

"I can't," I said. "I can't get on this. It's like a death trap."

"Do you want to skip it?" Tiffany asked. "Go try to catch a train?"

I thought of the sunk cost and shook my head.

"Pick a top bunk, that way it's not so claustrophobic," she whispered.

The only top bunk left was in the back of the bus. Unlike the rest of the bunks, which were divided into three rows, the back top and bottom bunks had room for five people. I took the "seat" closest to the window, leaving Tiffany to fend for herself against her Vietnamese neighbor, a teenage girl who seemed to have no qualms about spending 14 hours next to the god-only-knows-how-old engine of a bus being driven far too fast on far too narrow roads.

"Do you see an emergency exit!?" I hissed. "I mean, in case we, like, tip over?"

Tiffany shook her head.

"Where's the bathroom?" she asked.

A fellow tourist pointed halfway up the bus. We peered, and saw a door for little people. I closed my eyes and began shutting down all my mental and bodily functions.

Tiffany reached for a piece of pineapple. I decided to shut down her bodily functions too.

"Nope," I said, stuffing the fruit, the bread and our waters into my backpack. "We are not eating or drinking anything. We are not using that bathroom."

And we didn't. Fourteen hours later, when we stopped for breakfast (we still had two hours to go), Tiffany and I slipped carefully down from our bunk and made our way to the door, stepping over the Vietnamese people we had picked up throughout the night who were sleeping in the aisles. Our bodily functions were functioning again. We followed the signs for the toilet.

It was, like all the other public bathrooms we had seen, a hole in the ground.

But you know what?

We were still alive to see it.

*This post brought to you by Courtney, Tiffany's childhood friend who reads my blog even though she's never met me (thank you!) and suggested I write about our worst travel experience. To find out how you can suggest a post topic, click here.

**The picture shown here is the view from our rear top bunk.