Stuck in transport limbo

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The guy from the travel agency picks us up at 6:30am and drives us to the bus station, which is located 10 minutes outside of town. We wait around for the bus to Paksan, scheduled to leave at 7:00. Nothing happens, and I first get impatient, then worried, followed by anxious, desperate, and finally resigned. At 9:00am a sorry-looking midibus comes rattling around the corner. The driver, who looks suspiciously like a Mongolian with his fair skin, red cheeks and wind-proof eyes, puts up a sign that says 'Paksan' and proceeds to load the passengers' luggage onto the roof. Almost everybody appears to take along a big sack of rice. There are not many passengers on the bus, and I rejoice a bit prematurely, as we pick up people along the way until the bus is so crammed that some have to sit in the aisle on their rice sacks.

After about an hour we are maybe 20km outside of Phonsavan, and the road cannot even be described as bad anymore, because it literally doesn't exist in some places. It is being built as we drive, and at one point we have to wait for the excavator to flatten the ground for us so we can continue. At a very steep hill with unsealed road surface, the inevitable happens, and the tires get stuck. Everyone leaves the bus as road workers and passengers from an oncoming bus gather to watch the spectacle. Our resourceful Mongolian driver gets a rope from somewhere, fastens one end at the front of the bus and the other at an excavator's thumb, and the latter proceeds to tug the bus out of the sand while the bus driver accelerates just a bit. I'm amazed that we got out of this situation so easily, and we hop on and continue our trip.

As we pass by a tiny village made up mostly of dust and ramshackle buildings, four guys aged maybe 18-20 enter the bus. They are what probably could be considered dressed up by Laotian standards, wearing shirts and shoes and having their hair styled with gel. Their outfit screams 'I want to get laid tonight' with a sick sort of desperation. The look on their faces and the way they scan the bus, trying to appear intimidating, indicates that they are the bad boys of town, or at least so they want to make everybody on the bus believe. Upon noticing us, they start staring as if we had a severe case of bubonic plague on our faces. Even the slightest observation about our appearance is commented on and laughed about amongst them in a manner that is way beyond obvious and extremely rude. It takes them maybe 30 minutes to gradually lose interest and crack all the hackneyed jokes and comments they can think about, e.g., and I conjecture: "I'd do her"; "Look at those tits"; "Haha, look, he's got long hair, he must be gay"; "What's that on his arm?"; "What's that on his leg?"; "What's that in his ears?"; "Doesn't matter, he's so gay"; "She's Japanese"; "His nose is so long, lol!"; "Hey, farang, I'm from a little shithole in the middle of nowhere and I wish I had some pussy as well, you don't even understand a word of Laotian, so I'll insult you to your face and laugh about it with my dumb-arse mates before we get off in the next shithole to play a round of circle jerk".

The unease among the other passengers about the guys' disrespectful and boisterous behaviour is palpable, and even the driver keeps watching them warily in the rearview mirror. When one of them lights a cigarette and starts puffing away, a lady with a kid on her lap close to him begins to cough and wave the smoke away from her. First the guy doesn't notice, but when he does, he looks around and sees other people staring at him in a reproachful manner, so he takes one last drag and throws the fag out the window. We are highly amused by his apparent embarrassment and that he was put in place by an effective social system of checks and balances.

Luckily, they get off after the next toilet break. I check the time, and it's eight hours since we've started. We approach another small village called Tha Thom, and upon checking the map, I realize it's barely half-way between Phonsavan and Paksan. The driver has to stop many times for people to hop on. They are literally stopping the bus in front of their houses, usually a member of the family sees the bus approaching and runs out to wave it down, and after a while the person to get on the bus comes out with lots of luggage. Our Mongolian bus driver always gets out to help them and to fasten the bags on the roof of the bus. They take their rice sacks with them on board, and when the whole procedure is finally over after 5-10 minutes, the bus starts again, and somebody else waves it down 50 metres later. I can't fathom why they don't have a bus stop, maybe it's due to the fact that the bus times are so volatile, given the woeful condition the roads are in, and the myriad of random breaks. The size of the rice sacks seems to increase with every passenger that gets on; the first one has 10kg, then there's one with 20, then 25, until one hauls up a 50kg one.

When it gets dark, I get genuinely worried that the bus might break down in the middle of nowhere. The road is still as bad as bad gets, mostly consisting of steep hills and potholes, and there are no lights, the only illumination we get is from the weak car lights, parting a veil of darkness as we proceed. Speaking of which, a couple of hours after dusk the lights start to flicker, then go out altogether. The driver stops the motor, waits for a minute or two, and when he starts it again, the cables, which are laid open beyond the dashboard, emit sparks, freaking everybody out. Our Mongolian ushers all the passengers out and proceeds to fix it. We wait around in the dark, weary and disheartened, and after half an hour of trial and error, the motor starts and the lights turn on as if touched by something remarkably close to magic.

Just before midnight, we arrive in Paksan, dirty, stinky, hungry and beat-up. We find a nearby hotel for the night but I fail to find an eatery that's still open. In the morning we walk to the market for a breakfast of fried noodles and baguette with sweet condensed milk. There's no reason to stay around in Paksan any longer, so we hop on a doubledecker bus to Pakse, which is so packed that we have to sit on tiny plastic chairs in the aisle. Long story short, the bus terminates in Savannakhet, which wasn't what we paid for, so I argue with the ticket guy until he pays for our ride on the next bus to Pakse, which turns out to be a dilapidated death trap. Suffices to say that the bus is loaded with humans beyond all sense and any sensibility. When the driver stops for a toilet break, those who need to go climb out of the windows and back the same way. There's another farang couple, which is good, as it takes the heat and attention off us a bit. Better yet, the girl is blonde, so all the guys are busy checking her out and leave us alone.

We arrive in Pakse at around 11pm, and of course we are dumped at some godforsaken bus station somewhere out of town. The members of the local tuk tuk mafia get all excited when they see the foreigners, quoting us extortionate prices for the short ride into town. Our attempts at negotiating remain futile, as they seem to realize that we are at their mercy, seeing that it's dark and our options are rather sparse. Still, we walk away from them and make our way towards Pakse. The other couple has done the same thing, so we join forces in trying to stop a car for the ride. After less than 5 minutes a pick-up stops and we get inside while they hop on the truck bed. The driver is friendly and speaks a bit of English, so we chat with him for the 10 minutes it takes to get to town. He recommends us a hotel, but it's booked solid, so we walk around until we find a semi-decent one for a not-so-decent price, but after two days of torturous bus rides, we don't care all that much anymore.

We spend the next couple of days doing next to nothing to recover from said transport insanity, eating lots of great Indian food and enjoying the relaxed vibe of Pakse. One morning, as we walk towards a different bus station to catch a sawng thaew to Wat Phu Champasak, we get lost in some small alleys. A pack of mangy dogs starts barking at us aggressively, and the biggest fucking mongrel of them all comes towards us, baring his teeth like a Moroccan faux guide whose services have been refused. I raise my foot, pretending to kick out at it, which proves to be ineffectual in flip-flops, so I shout, which doesn't deter it either. Luckily, some locals come out of their houses upon hearing the commotion, and start shooing them away. When the big dog tries to make a last sneak attack at us, a guy hurls a broken roof tile at it, hitting it square on its back with authority, making it yelp and run away. I've never been this grateful for animal cruelty before, and we thank them and move on.

In the end, we find the bus station and manage to locate the right sawng thaew. While we wait, we start chatting to an Australian guy who works as a nurse in Alice Springs out of all places, and he gives us some insider information on the state of the Aboriginal community there, which pretty much worsened my already pessimistic perception of it.
The trip to Wat Phu takes about one and a half hours, which includes a short ferry trip across a narrow river. Wat Phu was built in the 6th century, and is thus older than Angkor Wat; archaelogists even believe that it served as a blueprint for Angkor and other Khmer temples in Cambodia. It's one of two UNESCO World Heritage Sites of Laos, the other being the town of Luang Prabang. Unfortunately, a big part of the palaces has collapsed and is currently being reconstructed, so only the upper section is accessible. The road to the steep stairway is lined with phallic symbols and naga statues, and the pretty jacaranda trees make it all the more photogenic.
The temple sanctuary itself is notable for the intricate carvings on the walls and doors, and I curse the day my DSLR camera died. The most interesting carved stones in the upper section are the elephant and the crocodile stone, it's always marvellous to see such ingenious craftsmanship without the help of modern technology.

Heading back to Pakse, we hitch a ride with a Cambodian tour group in a midibus. The tour guide speaks good English and translates what we say for the group, which consists mostly of middle-aged ladies. The atmosphere on the bus is relaxed and cheerful, with everybody constantly laughing and singing and cracking jokes, fortunately not at our expense for once. I start chatting to some of the ladies in French, which is pretty cool, although it takes a while for me to shake off the linguistic cobwebs. They actually ask me if J. is 'ma concubine', which makes me feel like a mixture of a sex tourist and a royal farang. Two or three of them keep looking at me with stars in their eyes, while I maintain a semi-embarrassed grin throughout the trip.

They drop us off at their hotel in Pakse, and we walk back to ours, passing a couple of pretty temples along the way. We have one last big dinner at our favourite Indian restaurant before we buy our bus tickets to Ubon Ratchathani back in Thailand for the following morning, where we head to cut down to Cambodia. Next stop: Siem Reap et les mighty temples d'Angkor. Some things you just cannot afford to miss, I reckon.

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