A bus trip to Luang Prabang

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At 7.00am I was picked up by a slightly larger version of a tuktuk, but smaller than a songteau, the trucks that double as taxis. The rain that had promised for the last two days had arrived in the night. Not the thunderous, heavy downpours you get in the southern parts, more like the gentle rain that droppeth from heaven that we are used to, with apologies to Billy Shakespeare. The tuktuk picked up a number of passengers for the Luang Prabang bus and deposited us all at the Northern bus terminal about 7km out of town. The bus was a bright yellow double decker with the driver and luggage on the ground floor and passengers on the upper deck. We departed precisely at 8.00am for what was billed as an 8 hour trip. We weren't far out of Vientiane when we started a zigzag climb into the jungle clad hills that were to be the main aspect of the view all the way to Luang Prabang. By 10.30am we has witnessed 3 accidents, one car had driven over a cliff into the jungle below and the other two were people driving on the wrong side of the road on blind corners and being surprised when they collected someone coming the other way. The majority of accidents here happen at about 20km/h so damage is limited to headlights and bumpers. Around midday we had to slow for a large number of people on the road and there was an open coffin surrounding by candles, we'd just driven through a funeral. As the drops and hills on both sides of the road are near vertical the people living along the road make full use of the flat space. The road really struggles to be called a two lane road with the bus having to pull over every time a large piece of earthmoving equipment was transported in the opposite direction, ie. pretty frequently. We drove through Vang Vieng about midday, a town in a valley with a muddy brown river flowing through and enormous karsts rearing up behind the town. On a good day I think the view would have been spectacular but with the cloud almost at road level the karsts were hidden in the mist and the town looked almost deserted. We stopped around 1pm for lunch, pho ga, chicken noodle soup, which hit the spot nicely. As we wound our way through the mountains, with jungle so close it sometimes scraped both sides of the bus simultaneously, it became apparent that they had received a lot of rain overnight, there were a lot of landslides that we were forced to crawl around or over. Eventually we came to one that was blocking the road completely but a large loader had cleared most of it. After a wait of 15 minutes or so the small truck in front of us was allowed through. He got about 2/3's of the way then his front wheels slid gracefully into the drainage ditch on the high side of the road to much merriment. A bunch of road workers eventually pushed him out. Next up was a couple of motorcyclists, one made it right through, the other dropped the bike into the slime at the same spot the truck went over. The rider got up covered in mud and went on his way. Then it was our turn, we crept onto the slip in crawler gear and sure enough when we hit the spot marked x the bus began to slide sideways toward the drainage ditch, I had vision of the wheels going in and the whole thing toppling over but the wheels found traction right on the lip of the drain and we were through.

The jungles of Laos are like nothing I've ever seen before, bamboo and creepers making the whole thing completely impenetrable then every once in a while you'll come across entire mountain sides that have been cleared with what can only be enormous effort, with the whole thing planted in corn and rice. The scenery on the trip was stunning and we worth the price of a bus ticket, even in the wet.

We finally arrived in Luang Prabang at 7.00pm, 12 hours after I started, but the ordeal wasn't quite over. A tuktuk driver took a bunch of us from the train station to the town centre and dropped me at the night market assuring me the guesthouse was just along street, at that point a whole series of well meaning people pointed me in differing directions obviously with no clue where the place was. After wandering in circles for about 40 minutes I flagged down a tuktuk driver who called the hotel and got directions. I was about 75 metres away and had probably passed it twice, I gave the driver the equivalent of $2 and he was made up, and I was grateful to be able to drop my pack.

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