Voyage back to the Mekong

There are a few different options to consider when planning a trip from Northern Vietnam to Central Lao. You could take a flight directly from Hanoi to Luang Prabang and enjoy the 45 minutes in the air and then a quick 10 minute taxi to your guest house in the quant little French colonial village... You could... Or...

Assuming you don't want to spend $175 for each ticket and also the logic that says, hey, we'd have to ride back 8 hours to Hanoi and then take the flight in the same direction we just rode from! We are already soooo close to the border, let's take the bus!

Why yes, close to the border we were and the bus path would only cost us about $20 each...No brainier right? Even after reading the horror stories that are found online within seconds of searching for other peoples experience, we thought it would be an AWESOME idea. And it was!

Now what path do we take? What is the first bus's path? We assumed finding a night bus that would bring us a good ways along the path was a given. Though after asking around, the reality of what we were about to embark on became much more clear.

Day one started with jumping into our mini bus at 7:30 AM. We had chosen a shit hole guest house to stay the night in Sapa just so it would be directly across the street from the bus station. Thinking ahead as usual! After some minor confusion we found our mini bus and had our seats.

Now the fun part begins... As we should have already known from prior experience, the van actually goes back into town to pick up other customer directly at their hotels. So much for our planning ahead, and now this is adding on an extra 45 minutes and we have not even left town. Why they can't have everyone meet at the bus station to save an hour is beyond me, but that is a whole other blog in itself!

Finally the van was full. 18 seats, 16 people, nice. Two more seats remain, who would get them? We pull over once again to grab our last couple. Wait, they have four people! Four, we can't fit four says our driver, "pick a boy and a girl and let's go!". Yea right, the group and the van guide argued for a good 15 minutes before we finally left. Now we know why we got to the bus station early on! We actually received our seats that we paid for! Later, a couple on our van told us the same had happened to them the day before. They were offered a free nights stay and a ride the next day. This works out fine if you are not on a planned trip with limited time only! Luckily, we had neither issue. We were on our way to Lao (here they do not have an "s" at the end)!

Obviously we had been naive about the smooth and simple plan to do most of the traveling overnight. The roads were insane! Crazy curves through the mountains, dirt roads to rock roads, to paved and back to dirt! 50 foot drop offs with no guard rails, speeds that shouldn't be used on a finished straight road, oh it was good. On top of it, you couldn't even fit a normal bus on this road and you CERTAINLY would not want to be driving at night. The beauty of it all made it worth it. The endless mountain ranges, beautiful blue skies, all breathtaking, especially when being flung from side to side around the curves!

Day 1 ended in Dien Bien, on the border. We're not in Lao yet? Turns out there is a 5:30 am bus in the morning that will cross the border. Good thing we made friends on the bus. It looks like we will be very close friends before the end of this...

Day two began very early. We had spent the prior night walking around the dinky border town and eating some decent Pho. We had a nasty, but dirt cheap room with the rest of our van mates across from the bus station. We boarded the bus rested and ready at 5:15 AM. Our buddies had already found their seats, no one was taking any chances.

The bus was beat up and full of goods being transported over the border. We sat squished, but comfortable for the 8 hour ride. The scenery was amazing as day one, and the breeze through the windows made us feel like we where in a luxury van, not a beat stinky one. We were moving along now.

After a smooth, but hour long process of going through customs at the border, we reinterred our vehicle. This was easy, just need to be patient with time and we will be there safely and comfortably for sure. Our guide (I use the word loosely, there is always another guy or two in these kinds of vans to collect money and tell people what to do. They are not there for your convenience, they are there for their own transport and to be sure everyone behaves and pays) tells us it will only be 2 more hours. Two more hours to Muang Khua and the prospect of a later bus or boat to our first location! We were optimistic...

After town hours the van stopped abruptly at a river crossing. There was a ferry there, but it seemed that the van was not driving on the ferry. The guide opens the door and says, "GET OUT". All of us puzzled, slowly get out of the van. We gathered our things and trying to look like tough and solid travelers all asked what was next.

A long boat will ferry us across, "Luang Prabang", says a man as he points across the river. Only 2,000 kip? That's only 20 cents, and we have change from the border crossing. There will be in ATM in the town I assured Ngoc confidently. So we got on the long boat (2 feet wide and 20 feet long powered by a weak stinky engine that sounds like a helicopter). Took a total of 30 seconds to get us across and we were back on land. So we're was everyone pointing? Why are they loading up the goods from the boat on to trucks (tuktuks)? Again, "Luang Prabang", that said and pointed further in the same direction as before. The bus station must be in town further up. Keep in mind we are n Lao now, no more Vietnamese, no more communication skills!

The tuktuk... How do I even describe this? Think of the front end of a motorcycle with the back end of a pickup truck connected behind it. Then cover the back and add benches. Don't forget to load 500 lbs of packs and goods on top in a very precarious way. Then charge 5000 kip a person (70 cents) even though we just paid your friend to take us across the river. Fine, we have no choice and now let me share also that we have about 20 kip left between the two of us. We got on...

We expected a quick ride and then to see a some what urban environment after being so harshly dropped at the edge of a river. Not so fast, "Bus station" they say. What!? This is a grass patch with a tiny van parked on the side. We have nearly 20 people! Yes one singular van...and no ATM. Of course they have a ticketing window though, they must get paid!

Ticket cost, wait one minute. Where does the bus go? Not Luang Prabang, but to
Muang Khua, we haven't made it there yet? What about all the pointing? Price is 35,000 kip each? We only have 20,000! No time for weighing other options, the sun is going down and we are the middle of no where. What to do??

Ngoc begged and pleaded with multiple people before someone agreed to buy 100,000 of our Vietnamese dong. Ok, we are nearly there, 15,000 more. Two of our travel mates loaned us the money and we got the tickets! Yes, we are back on track! Wait, the bus is filling, where will we sit?

We thought the last van trip I wrote about was bad, ohhhh no. This van had 2 seats next to each other on the left side of the bus and single seats on the right. In the aisle there were small plastic seats sitting one in from of the other to fit more. In the tiny space left were goods for transport and Ngoc and I sitting on our packs. Squished like sardines next to our travel mates of more than 24 hours straight now. There were people stacked in the front like bags of rice (on the bags of rice ironically) and about 6 men standing squished against one another next to the side door. There was not an inch to move. Once you find your self laying between a strangers legs (a grown man) on a bus in the middle of Lao, bracing your arm on a local girls back and the the arm around a young boys shoulders just to sit straight...it's just laughable. This is all we could do, laugh, and we did the entire 3 hour ride to the city!

Well, not quite... 2 hours and 45 minutes in, the van breaks down! We are literally on a deserted road with a few shacks next to us. The sun is gong down and we have no money! The bus is actually breaking down!

Leave it to Ngoc to find the positive. He walks up to one of the shacks and befriends the 6 puppies and little kids playing. We spend the next 30 minutes in utter disbelief about what was happening and praying we were not about to walk 8 km to town. Luckily for us, a man arrived with some new gas, some tinkering in the engine, and we were off again. No hiking tonight!

We made it to the town finally. Exhausted beyond belief and now very sure that wed be staying another night before making it to our actual first location. We found the energy to walk into town and find a hotel. We found an ATM after some searching and a minor freak out when the first wouldn't accept my card, but the second ATM down the street worked just fine and we now had money! A nice place to stay with wifi and English tv, yes!

Day three began with the knowledge that things could not really get worse. With this in mind we walked down to the bus station and purchased our tickets. On the bus we met a few of our travel partners from the previous days and sat comfortably in a full sized bus not even half full. This was too good to be true?

About half way through the very comfortable ride we stopped to pick up a few more passengers. They were from a local village and looked the part. Men, women, and children boarded the bus will baskets full of who knows what. The children were covered in ripped and dirty clothing and many were elderly women. This was fine, they smiled and found their seats. But why do they all have odd white paper bandages on their face, necks, and arms?

15 minutes in and we knew... A remedy for motion sickness! They must have never been on a bus before! One by one, they all began to vomit... loudly. The guide knew this detail ahead of time and had given them all plastic bags, now we knew what those were for! All around us you could hear and smell the aroma. Behind us sitting next to a friend an elderly lady was having a rough time. She insisted on holding on to her bag even it it was nearly full of whatever she had eaten that morning. She tied it to the back of the seat ahead of her just in case more was to come. The bag swayed back and forth as Ngoc and I did our best not to look back and worry about our packs sitting just a few feet away from the swinging bag on the floor. Would it leak? Would it fall? We didn't want to get involved...

Ngoc had to though, even after wrapping his hoodie around his face as a filter (I had a scarf on already to protect from the dust) he couldn't stop thinking about the swaying bag of vomit...he stood up, grabbed all of the bags from where the guide had placed them and offered them to the lady. She tossed hers over our friend and out the window. Catastrophe averted, all thanks to the amazing Ngoc, the care taker of elderly native Lao women on futuristic transportation.

This all went on and on for about another hour until we hit a rest stop. There we all ran off the bus and got some fresh air. I personally kept my scarf over my face for safety sake, but ngoc felt relieved enough to walk into yet another strangers house to go kiss and cuddle their puppies. The day was looking up.

We boarded the bus again (while one woman still had her head out of the window vomiting on the street), but together exhaled a HUGE sigh of relieve when the entire village exited the bus about 15 minutes later. Now all we needed to deal with was the lingering offensive scent. Nothing the scarf couldn't handle.

We sat comfortably and listened to our music for the next hour or so until FINALLY arriving our actual first destination in Lao, Luang Prabang. A short and cheap ride on another tuktuk lead us to the center of this beautiful French colonial town on the Mekong.

Three days of travel offered us an experience that no 45 minute flight could ever. New friends, beautiful scenery, worry for the safety of our life's, and worry that some major illness was circling the country side leading to mass vomiting was just the beginning of what we gained. In the end we would have changed nothing. This was the way to do it and now we are ready for Lao. A new country for the second month of this wonderful journey. We can only hope for such great stories to tell when we attempt to go from Lao to Cambodia in a few weeks!

Below you will see the view when crossing the border with the clouds below us in the valleys, the sun set our first night in Luang Prabang, me on a Mekong riverboat, and these amazing and adorable boys playing as a pack along the rivers cliffs. They made their way into the water looking more like Antelope than young boys. Why didn't I grow up doing that?

Next up is Ngoc's story of us going against clear warnings of a fortune teller in Vietnam. What did we do?