It's not all fun and games this backpacking life. Reading travel blogs is often enough to make you sick, all 'happy happy joy joy' with little mention of the mundane and frustrating parts of getting from here to there. For example with us, we haven't spoken of our cockroach friends who occasionally climb our bedroom walls, the endless hassle from hawkers and opportunists, removing floating ants from your noodle soup, spotting the liars and cheats, getting lost in places where looking like a lost tourist is a hazard to your health etc.
But there's a little part of the mundane category that we'll possibly look back on with at least a clenched teeth smile when we're done traveling, taking the 'local' bus and I'd like to blabber a bit about it before Angie covers the start of Vietnam.
Local buses are those not herding the tourist cattle from spot to spot with the added luxury of air con and a toilet and we took our first from Vientiane to Tha Kek, the start of the Loop.
The first thing I noticed was the floor was missing. Not a hole, although we've encountered that as well, it was just covered the length of the bus with rice bags, fertiliser, rolls of carpet, small children etc, providing a scramble course to your seat. Now, on a local bus it's very unlikely there will be any other westerners, therefore you are the center of attention, and the butt of any jokes and generally good humored abuse. All eyes are on you, many are smiling and pointing, everybody is laughing at my 'tiny guitar'.
One that we haven't quite figured out yet is Laos ladies often lift their babies up and point at me then the baby's head, then at me, then laugh hysterically and all those around have a good chuckle, very strange.
So, our sweaty smell journey begins. It's a six hour drive and we've a bus load of people and Laos pan pipe type music blaring out of the stereo, all is well. But then we stop ten mins down the road, two bus boys appear at our windows, climbing down from the roof and start ushering in another twenty five people. This lot are given one foot high stools, they move to the back and start balancing themselves on the rice, carpets etc. To get everybody in they sit with their legs open and the stool in front is jammed between them, so everybody is getting friendly now.
Things are getting towards drip-sweaty and the three people next to me in the Aisle have given up mocking my Ukelele and are now trying to find a good spot of my chair to rest their heads and arms. People aren't keen on opening windows for some reason and conditions could be described as tropical.
Toilet stops are an event on local buses. They come only when the driver feels the urge himself, sometimes not at all. When such a chance comes most of the bus de-mangle themselves and spread from the bus in all directions, as the bus will have stopped in a random location and your toilet is limited only by your imagination. We didn't have the guts to leave the bus the first time for fear of being demoted to the stool seats of death by sweat. We've now perfected the art of shutting up shop on long journeys, when mother nature calls we tell her where to shove it.
This was a smelly uncomfortable trip but looking back it had been an easy journey to break us in. Our next dip was straight after the loop. To avoid waiting four days for a bus to Hanoi, we opted at short notice to take a sleeper bus to Hue, Vietnam, A journey which turned out to be over fifteen hours on the dirtiest shack on wheels we've ever come across.
The fun started before we got on the bus. We had to haggle with an opportunist wild eyed bus driver on what should have been a set price. Thankfully about half the bus got off in curiosity and three ladies, whom we came to name The Laos Mafia (they had bundles and bundles of cash with them and seemed to run the show), butted in and suggested through waving cash at us what we should really pay, much to the annoyance of the driver. So we all got on, went through the customary
laugh at the Ukelele etc and we were off.
I struggled to settle into the upright dirt ridden chairs, I was worried about our valuables and my ear plugs were proving useless to the horrible Laos pop CD that repeated every eight tracks so for more or less the entire journey sleep was a struggle for me. Angie on the other hand has an incredible talent; she can shut her eyes, in any situation and wallop, she's gone. There was the music, people shouting, the crazy broken Laos roads that were repeatedly bouncing her head off the bus window and still she slept!
At around 12.30 am we made a non-toilet stop and about six men from the bus got off and disappeared into the bushes. Within ten minutes they were set up like a human conveyor belt transporting huge stacks of pre-bundled teak wood to the back of the bus. They looked crazy heavy, maybe twenty one meter chunks to each bundle. One after another they filled the back of the bus, dragged along ripping chunks out of the sides of the bus seats and floor. After a short fag break they started filling up the aisle to the height of the top of our heads, climbing over us, using the seats to move about. By the time we were finished we were completely blocked into our seat with wood and one of the men had put a thin mat on top of the central wood pile to sleep on.
Throughout this forty minutes of madness, the banging, shouting, scraping of wood, I kept turning in disbelief to find that Angie was sleeping away like she had curled up in some luxury double quilted four poster bed. What a talent.
As it happened, the stacked wood to my left provided me with a spot to lean my head and I managed to get a bit of kip.
At roughly 2am we stopped again, this time to unload the cargo. I counted forty-five stacks leave the bus in another thirty minutes of action.
At 3am I must have nodded off as I awoke to find most people off the bus. It turned out that the border didn't open till 7am and we were just going to park five minutes away until it did. Most people chose to sleep outside the bus but we stuck with the security of our smelly shelter. I put on an eye mask light blocker type thing and got to sleep pretty swiftly.
I was woken up at about 5:45am to find about seven of our fellow passengers laughing at me and in particular my eye mask. One of the blokes, a right character who had been helping us out along the bus journey, asked to borrow the mask and my uke. Barely awake, the sight of this joker wandering outside the musk wearing my mask and strumming random notes on my uke, much to the delight of everyone else, was a surreal start to the day.
That morning we had to leave our bags on the bus and cross the border on foot, a very scary process at the time. The Laos Mafia helped out and we stayed close the them when, at 7am the border opened and about fifty of us raced 600 meters from passport control to the main gate, where we saw three guards who were getting bribes and backhanders left right and centre. We had our visas and papers and luckily weren't asked for extras.
To cut ,what is turning out to be, a long story short, it was another six hours before we were dropped off in a random spot 2 km from the city of Hue. A very paranoid trip but full of character (our clothes were full of character too and we needed a shower) I'm sure we won't forget that one in a hurry, apart from of course Angie, who spent most of the time dreaming.
We only took two pics from that trip as we didn't want to draw attention to our valuables. Here is the empty bus on the morning waiting for the border to open (after the wood had been cleared):
http://www.flickr.com/photos/62402778@N06/5822929053/in/photostream
Here's one of the blokes with my uke, and this time my sunglasses, parading outside the bus as we waited in the vehicle queue:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/62402778@N06/5823494298/in/photostream
