Vietnam: Sleeper bus from Nga Trang to Saigon

I'm waiting at the travel agent office for my bus ride to Saigon.  For some reason when I was booking my ticket, the bookings lady tried all she could to get me to catch a bus at a different time, but the timing was perfect for me - I would leave Nga Trang in the evening, and arrive in Saigon at around 6am - perfect!

It seems I'm the only person catching this bus south to Saigon.  A bus-load of backpackers loads onto a bus headed north to Hoi An.  Funnily enough I swear it's the same crappy bus that I took from Hoi An to here.  Eventually, a man arrives to pick me up and loads me into a small minivan with a TV in it blasting on-stage Vietnamese music.  Secretly I hope that I've been swindled and that this is my sleeper bus to Saigon.  But hey - the van has good aircon and my legs fit in the seats!

My fears are unwarranted though and shortly after picking up an English/Australian couple from a hotel I'm taken to a different travel agent where another bus is waiting outside.  This one actually looks modern and has a tv in it playing a Vietnamese stage show.  One by one customers arrive and board the bus - eventually it turns out that myself and the English + Australian combo couple are the only western people on the bus - the rest are Vietnamese.   The air-con works great, the bus is clean, and we're given blankets and bottles of water.  The best part of all is the driver avoids potholes instead of aiming for them, and goes very easy on the horn, and is more likely to slow down gently than swerve from side to side while braking hard.  He even got us to saigon 30 minutes early with his careful driving.

I guess the moral of the story here is do the opposite of what the travel booking office says.  I'm not going to "Pro Tip" this because it's probably not true.