Laos and the impossible journey to Vang Vieng

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So here's the story of how a twenty hour bus journey turned into something much more.

We set off on our twenty hour bus journey, and despite our bags being moved from the compartment to the roof, the unexplained hour-long stops and consistent breakdowns, it was a very successful bus ride. We left Hanoi and 6:30 pm and arrived twelve hours later at the border of Laos.

Getting the Visa on arrival ended up taking two hours. You had to fight through a mob of pushy Vietnamese in order to get a form, fill it out, fight through the mob, hand in the form with your passport, wait for the single clerk to get around to it, then receive a receipt, which you take to another desk. Pay the clerk there, receive a slip to say you've paid, which you take back to the original clerk who returns your passport to you. Take your passport and the slip from desk two to another counter which is also mobbed by the Vietnamese, get a form from them, fill it out, fight the mob again and then get it stamped. Oh, and there is no english instruction. and you need to be sure they're not cheating you (someone on our bus almost got ripped off and ended up having to bribe them for the stamp they'd already paid for - a whopping six dollars.)

So we got through that relatively unscathed, but a bit drenched (it's the rainy season in Laos).

We got to talking to some Germans on the bus who persuaded us that the best route to take was to get off this bus in Vientianne, the nations capital, and immediately board another bus for a four hour journey north, which would end up in Vang Vieng. We figured if we got off, we'd sleep most of the day away, so we may as well keep trucking.

We caught the bus just in time. It was a local bus so we had very little (or in my case almost no) leg room, but it's only four hours, after all. Or is it?

The bus stopped behind a line of busses. It was almost pitch black, but there was no end to the busses as far as we could see. We got off the bus and walked just shy of a kilometer past trucks busses, motos, you name it - to see what the hold-up was. A lake, it turned out.

It's the rainest season they've had in four years and Laos' one road heading north was flooded. Not a little flood, like I sometimes found in Australia, a big ol flood that takes three or four minutes by boat to cross. So cross we did, in search of another person to take us there. Unfortunately, Laos has a curfew of 11:30, at which time the streets are to be empty, so noone dares risk driving past this time. So we were left with one option: sleep in the bus.

Did I mention my lack of legroom? Yeah, I had to sleep in the aisle. Which turned out to be a good decision, since noone else got a blink that night due to the heat inside the bus. Even Anais (the french girl we've been travelling with for about a week now), who was by the window, slept poorly, since a Laotian man kept coming around to her window to look at her.

at five the next morning we caught a man who'd just been canoeing into his front door. He took us across and we poked around. We did end up finding someone to take us the rest of the way, and it cost us a whopping 3 dollars per person. It was a deal that pleased both of us very much. Our bags nearly fell off the roof and the engine failed a couple of times, but all in all, it was an entirely successful trip. Flooding 0, Tourists 1.

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