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Published: October 5th 2009
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While every bus journey in Laos is an adventure, the trip to Savanakhet was one of the best yet. The ten-hour ride featured one fascination after another.
First, I watched as a mother assisted her two-year old son in urinating. On the floor. Of the bus. From her lap! The bus driver’s assistant, a boy who collects passenger’s money and helps with loading and unloading, objected to this method. “What? Why can’t my son pee on the bus floor? Why not?” No, I’m just kidding, I couldn’t understand the exchange so precisely, but it was clear the assistant was not OK with passengers peeing on the floor. Even if they were children. So the next time her son had to pee, the mother put an empty water bottle around his tiny penis and made Grandma throw the bottle out the window.
Then, I watched, enthralled, as another method of urination was introduced to me. The bus assistant told the driver he needed to urinate, so the driver pulled over quickly. The assistant walked one foot from the bus and simply pulled up on of his loose pant legs. He then peed, in full view of everyone on the bus,
but without revealing his penis. The pant leg acted like a private stall for his penis! The ladies technique for peeing in public, something I had already enjoyed, involved wearing or bringing a skirt to wear, thereby allowing one to squat and pee in the privacy of the skirt-stall, in broad view of all. A young father carried his two sons off the bus to pee. The four-year old peed one foot from the bus, in to a puddle, while the baby was held in the air, to also pee in the puddle. Now last but not least, there was also a monk on the bus. When he peed, as he was wearing robes, he simply squatted, like us ladies did in our skirts.
Keep in mind, there are no “rest stops” or McDonalds busses can stop at for pee-breaks here. There are plenty of “restaurants” but if the bus stopped at a restaurant, purchasing of food would of course be expected. You can only stop to eat so many times on a bus trip, but peeing, oh peeing is a frequent need, and kindly and frequently indulged by the driver. Anyway, as the stops involve nothing but pulling
over for one minute, the passengers peeing right next to the bus, frequent pee stops don’t add a lot of time to the trip. I also want to mention the amazing potty-training ability of most Lao parents. Many babies do not wear diapers yet do not wet themselves. Lao babies are trained very early to pee on command, usually a whispered, “shhhh” sound, and then are simply held, facing outwards, to pee in to the air.
At one point, a passenger, protesting the bus fee the bus assistant demanded, put on his motorbike helmet and pulled down the glass eye-covering, effectively ending the conversation by covering his face completely. It was hilarious! The stunned bus assistant, standing inches away, backed down and left him alone. But the passenger later paid. Not a bad way to avoid conflict.
I wouldn’t have thought there would have been space on the bus for fifty large bags packed with cabbage but apparently there was space. I should have known, when would I finally learn: there is no such thing as a bus that is too full. The bus assistant, after trying to shove all the bags in to the alley and failing,
finally told the passengers in the four back rows of seats to move. He then took out all four rows of seats and over the course of ten minutes, loaded all the cabbage on. For a while some other passengers and I had to stand, because the cabbage was taking up all the space, but then people got off and we could sit again. But for the duration of the ride I was nervous and kept turning around, scared the cabbage precariously balanced at the top of the pile was going to fall and bury me.
At another point, we passed a really nice, new soccer field, with grass and lines and even nets! Goats, water buffalo and cows were grazing upon it, eating away at the nice grass.
The bus honked often, to alert villagers that it was coming so they could run out of their homes and hop on if they wanted. The bus assistant would hang out the door, yelling, scanning for people that seemed interested in a ride. People would run out of their little huts, throwing their clothes on, grabbing their children, hopping on to the bus that slowed, but did not stop, to pick them up. Sometimes the bus stopped at appointed bus stops, and cute kids would climb aboard with skewers of beef, pork, frogs and bugs, bags of sticky rice, bottles of water. Most popular were the skewered eggs, steamed and stuck on a stick for sale. During one stop, I was eating a skewer of chicken and beef on a bench aside the bus. I suddenly realized, as that irony-chalky taste filled my mouth, that I was chewing on a piece of congealed blood. I couldn’t do it, so I started looking for an escape. I looked up and saw ten passengers on the bus watching me intently to see how I liked Lao food. I was in a tough spot. I tried to swallow but I just couldn’t. I turned away from the bus, walked back towards a corner in the restaurant, and spit the blood in to a napkin, politely. I swear that’s only the second time I’ve done that here. The first was when I was eating what I thought was a normal hard boiled egg, but in fact was an egg with a duck fetus inside.
Back on the bus, cruising north, I glimpsed goats sitting on a table on the porch of a house. It was raining, so that must have been their way of keeping dry. I watched many mama-cows and mama-water buffaloes cuddling with their baby-cows and buffaloes. Their interactions were so human-like, I felt terrible about regularly eating them.
The scenery was much like that of the island, flat, with large rice fields, trees dotting the landscape, and ramshackle homes. Such a variety of homes: brick, cement, wood, thatched bamboo, and sometimes even a combination of those materials in one home. Often, this meant a cement first floor, if the house wasn’t stilted, and a wood second floor. Every house looked like it took hard work, all by hand, by people unskilled in construction. No such thing as having your house built here; if you need a house, you build a house. Now, some people are handy, but for most people: can you imagine trying to build your own house by hand? And solely with materials you found around you or were able to trade for rice?
Ten often thrilling, but still long hours after departing Don Kong, the bus reached Savannakhet. I couldn’t feel anything but lucky though, as many people, like the saintly teenage parents with the four-year and six-month old children, still had ten hours before they reached their final destination, Vientiane.
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