Chicken bus to Luang Prabang

A 60 Baht ride from the hotel to the border, quick stamp on my way out, 20 Baht ride on a crowded bus over the Thai Friendship bridge, a $36 ($1 extra for packing my extra passport pictures so deep in pack that I chose not to retrieve it) and a 300 Baht taxi fare and then I was off to the Vientiane bus stop on my way to Luang Prabang, in the biggest piece of shit taxi imaginable.

Immediately after crossing the Thai-Laos Friendship bridge the median between the lanes widens, then criss-crosses at a traffic light with a large warning sign reading “In Laos, we drive on the RIGHT.” I had totally forgot about that. That cancelled out my plan of renting a motorbike. The next major difference in the two countries was the goats. Tons of them, every where. So many goats eating grass on the roadside and casually moseying into the hectic Laotian traffic of tuk-tuks, taxis, motorbikes and old ladies balancing oddly-shaped whicker containers over there shoulder on a bamboo pole. I found the traffic in Vientiane chaotic but when I looked around I noticed I was the only one who was worried. Everyone else driving amidst the dusty traffic was unaffected. They were neither bitching nor road raging, they weren't they screeching their breaks or screaming at near accidents. Their driving was business as usual.

As fluent as I might imagine myself to be in South East Asia, I managed to land myself in the shitty taxi, paying double the standard fare. When waiting for the driver to bring the car around I made small talk with a shop owner who gasped as my taxi rattled up to the shop. In Laos he said: “That is an a really ugly taxi, the ugliest taxi in Vientiane.” You can imagine my excitement. A sucker for punishment, I hopped in and then immediately regretted my decision when we pulled away and I realized the doors were missing handles to roll the windows down. It was a safe bet this taxi had no A/C.

The gruff driver rolled down his window and somehow reached back and jiggled one of my windows down. It was a dusty sauna of black carpet and black leather, with a small current of cooler, dusty air from outside passing through. I was told 300 Baht for the ride was a rip off but the ride was over 30 kilometers so I still feel like I got my money’s worth. That being said, if there was ever a taxi ride I would have liked to have ended quickly, this was the one.

Instead of staying in Vientiane, I decided to go straight to Luang Prabang to then work my way back south to the south before going home to Kalasin. At the bus station there were several signs advertising VIP buses to Luang Prabang but the few buses parked in the lot were a far cry from having A/C or a bathroom. The ticket counter confirmed my fears and told me the single bus in the lot that looked nice was headed to China and would not be willing to take passengers to Luang Prabang. I bought my cheap ticket for my chicken bus and waited for two hours while they stowed my bag in the back seats of the bus and stacked strange boxes and bags and random stuff on to the roof.

With a two hour wait and needing to work on my Laos, I started talking to a girl who was waiting to meet her mom. She was from Laos but worked at a coffee shop in Bangkok. She had traveled all the way there by bus to deliver her mom some cash and go back to make some more. When asked how many days they would spend together, she told me they would just meet and then each get on the next bus heading back out.

Other falang eventually rolled up, most with funky long hair cuts, worn in clothes, some with big sunglasses, and all wearing colorful but faded jewelry. There was mixed group of European dudes out to conquer the world one city at a time but going to each one and “doing it right.” They often told of the hangovers from the night before like they were injuries of war. They told me American Football was for pussies and that Americans were stubborn for not changing to the metric system.

Most roads in Laos are either under construction or should be. It’s not like the road of hell from Poi Pet to Siem Riep in Cambodia, but the edges of the road were buried in sand and dust and the pot holes were every where. The seats on the bus were average and did lean back but the windows were small sliders that would only open my window so far before pushing the person behind me’s window closed. Thus, we had to all be cordial with a bus neighbors and each share the medium flow of air.

Just leaving town I saw two monks sitting on a tractor while a man was pouring gas into the tank from a pitcher, a worker hoisting bricks up to the second story of a building one bucketful-at-the-end-of-a-rope at a time, and when we stopped in a small town old ladies would run up to our windows and try to sell us odd strips of grilled beef, guavas, and eggs-on-a-stick. For bathroom breaks we stopped in the middle of the nowhere so everyone could pee in the grass.

Up in the mountains the sun began to disappear and reappear from behind the mountains as we wound our way north. Just as the sun was about to drop for good, we arrived in Vang Vien and looking at my watch and thinking ahead of another 7 hours on the bus, I wished I was stopping there. But the ticket being paid for I decided to stick with it and ending up being the only falang left on the bus with 7 other people.

The red and orange hues hung in the sky for a while but when it was gone, the only thing I saw out my window was darkness. I fell asleep for a while then woke to see fires lighting up the mountains. From a distance the forest fires looked like thin veins of lava oozing down the mountain but as we would wind our way up, down or around the mountainside and eventually passed by them,they were so bright my eyes hurt.

Half way in the pitch dark 7 hour journey we stopped for dinner. I had some of that green stuff, some of this brown stuff, all on top of some rice, thank you very much. Before getting back on the bus I noticed the bus driver went to fridge and picked himself up the Thai bus driver night cap special: a couple cans of Beer Laos and a couple M 150s. Sap lie duuh.

The rest of the way there, the bus driver drove like we were rushing someone to the hospital. As he swerved left and right bottles and other garbage rolled from one side of the bus to the other with every jerk of the wheel. The overall rattling, shaking, clicking, jerking, high speeds and abrupt stops of the bus ride were very much similar to those of any rollercoaster worth waiting in line for. When it all came to an end, like some show on TV, I chose to believe that each of the 8 of us on the bus all became friends that day because we were each the survivor of a near death experience. We all waved good bye to each other at the bus station and wished each other good luck in our travels.

We arrived at 2:00 am, only two hours later than the bus driver had told. There were two tuk tuks waiting at the station but only one off the drivers woke up. Four of us shared a ride in the same one, them heading home and me heading out to find a guesthouse. Despite the noise coming from the tuk tuk, being outside I could hear how quiet it was at night in Luang Prabang. All shops were closed up, lights were off in homes, and nobody was in the streets. Then we got into town. We came to the local disco just as the bar has closing and suddenly we were in a sea of motorbikes rushing away like a motocross race. Drunk driving home from the bar, nobody wore helmets or drove carefully. They were all goofing around, driving along and still talking together before whisking off past our tuk tuk and on to some other party.

With one turn we lost all but a couple of them, and those even sped away quickly and again the town was quiet. The driver left me at the door step of a basic guesthouse where the owner who was sleeping next to his wife in the lobby under a mosquito net, woke up and showed me to a room. With sleepy eyes and no rush, he showed me a room, I took it, and before I could even ask how much, they guy just smiled and said, “tomorrow.”