September 21st - 23rd
The night bus from Phonsaven to Vientiane turned out to be pretty torturous. From the moment we got on to the moment we got off, ten hours later, we had to listen to karaoke tunes which must have been played at top volume. The "music" drowned my own on my ipod as well as my chances of getting any sleep. When I saw Robbie as we got off the bus, he told me that he came very close to lashing out at the driver. The strange thing was that, apart from one passenger asking for it to be turned off once, nobody protested. So it was Thai and Lao music plus an hour of Celine Dion at about 4am all the way.
Having already been there, we didn't stop in Vientiane but just jumped straight onto another bus to Tha Khek (well "straight" is a little bit of an exaggeration. It took about an hour to get a tuk tuk driver to understand that we wanted to go to the southern bus terminal to get on the bus to Tha Khek. He's not to blame of course. Our Lao hasn't progressed much in the days we've been here). Although the bus set off on time, we stopped about ten times in the first hour of the journey to collect and deposit various items (local buses here seem to serve simultaneously as delivery vans). At one of the stops a whole bunch of people jumped on thrusting various food products - baguettes, fruit, chewing gum, grasshoppers - onto our laps in the hope that we would suddenly desire such things on seeing them. There was no air conditioning on the bus but with the windows open it was bearable and we were just grateful that there was no karaoke music.
We arrived in Tha Kek at around 3pm and luckily found a place to stay before an afternoon downpour started. Ironically, as the rain was lashing down outside, I was in a towel for about fifteen minutes dashing around the guesthouse trying to get someone to turn on the water for a shower. It was a test of my patience after 19 hours on buses.
We didn't get up to much in Tha Kek, deciding to give the main tourist attraction in the area - a 7km cave - a miss because we had seen quite a number of caves in the north of Laos. We basically ate there (fried rice and pork on the first night followed by a very similar pork on a stick with sticky rice for breakfast the next day down by the Mekong), rested and got frustrated trying to use the internet which kept on crashing. My last meal there was, once again, rice and pork and as I tucked into it I wondered how many times I had eaten fried rice in the last couple of months. I must say though, it's normally always a winner!
