Another bus ride
Today I took the bus from Phonsavanh to Ventiane, the capital of Laos. The timetable showed buses at 6.45am and 7.45am. The hotel staff told me 7am and 8am. I arrived at the bus station at 7.30am to be told that the bus was at 9am. I would have to wait outside in the freezing cold. It was a ‘regular’ bus -the lowest class- a rickety old thing with bits visibly falling off. No scooters on the roof at least, but the luggage hold was stuffed full of 40kg bags of rice and a green plastic bag full of live ducks.
The first half of the journey was pretty uneventful. Aside from a brief stop at a roadside stall where the driver and three passengers bought firewood, we mainly just ploughed on down the winding mountain road. Like all of Laos’ intercity roads, road number 7 was a simple two lane affair, sometimes dropping down to one and a half lanes and occasionally falling into a category that Choy, the Laos guide on the cycling tour, described as ‘broken’: the usual (lightly potholed) tarmac being replaced by a rutted stretch of dirt track.
The bus pulled to a halt in Phu Khoun, the town where my previous bus had stopped for lunch. As before, no announcement or explanation, but I knew the drill now (or so I thought) and was about to follow a few of the other passengers off for noodle soup when the driver got back on board (with a bag of herbs and potatoes from a roadside stall), honked his horn a couple of times and started to drive off. One of the passengers that disembarked in Phu Khoun hitched a lift and caught us up further down the road. I’ll never know whether the others had intended to end their journey there or not.
We did stop for lunch a couple of hours later. Another bus was already at the rest stop. It was a VIP bus. All of its passengers were Westerners. I hadn’t seen another Westerner all day. It was strange to suddenly be surrounded by tourists.
After lunch the bus drove on into Vang Vien province. I’m running out of time on my Laos visa, and decided to skip Vang Vien and to keep on heading South. Vang Vien is known to be backpackers’ party central with bar upon bar selling cheap beer, showing old episodes (is there any other kind?) of Friends and serving Western food with ‘Happy’ additives. Vang Vien is also supposed to be beautiful and a great place for kayaking, tubing, cycling and rock climbing. From the bus, I got some great views of huge limestone karsts soaring up from the riverside, but I’ve seen a lot of beautiful countryside in the past few weeks and am becoming a little jaded. “Oh look, another spectacular jungle valley.” Around 85% of Laos is mountainous terrain and most of the country is forested. The whole place is stunning, and you get used to it. (Interestingly, Laos’ forests are mainly deciduous, but instead of shedding their leaves during the winter, many of the trees shed them over the dry season in order to conserve water.)
Midway through Vang Vien province, the bus pulled to a halt. We had a flat tire. The driver and two other bus company employees spent ages trying to change it. A lot of their time was spent hitting the tire with a metal pole. I couldn’t figure out quite what they were hoping to achieve by that. They were eventually successful and we go on our way.
I very quickly noticed that the bus was travelling faster. The driver swerved around the road at full pelt dodging potholes (unsuccessfully) and other road users (successfully), his fingers constantly on the horn to warn people that he was coming through. He was clearly trying to make up for lost time. I could no longer read as the hurtling bus’ non existent suspension bounced us around. I felt sorry for the ducks still holed up in the luggage hold.
At first, I found it all quite amusing. I assumed that this was fairly normal, that there was nothing to be afraid of and that there was nothing I could really do but laugh and turn the volume on my iPod up. So that’s what I did. Then I noticed the other passengers’ faces. Apart from two Lao girls in their early twenties who somehow managed to sleep through it all, all of the locals were sitting bolt upright in their chairs, looking very very tense. Particularly after the sun set and our frantic journey continued in the pitch black. The anxious looks soon turned into looks of horror when repeated bounces off potholes knocked loose one of the panels forming the aisle’s floor by where I was sat. For the rest of the journey, I kept one foot on the loose panel trying to stop it from jumping out of place again and I too started to look a little tense.
But we got to Ventiane eventually. Feeling relieved to be off the bus, I grabbed a tuk tuk from the out of town bus station. The driver took a turning that, from my brief look at the map, I hadn’t expected and I began to worry that we were heading out of town. Then he turned down an unlit dirt alleyway and I began to really worry. After surviving the bus journey was I about to be mugged or killed? No. The tuk tuk driver was just heading home to pick up his wife and kids. Can you imagine a London cabbie doing that?
