I should have known that we were in for a treat when we were waiting to get picked up for the bus ride. I was expecting a minibus or taxi or something to scoop us up and take us to the main bus station. A man pulled up on a motorbike and motioned for us to come outside. I looked at Paul, and then at our bags, and said, "there is no way we are getting on that bike". Silly me! We weren't going to get on the bike, we were going to wear our bags and walk as fast as we could and follow him while he rode his bike past various hostels and picked up more travelers along the way. Shuffling through rush hour old quarter Hanoi, with bags, and trying to follow a man on a motorbike that is wearing the same outfit as the 1000s of other men on motorbikes. It was like a fun Vietnamese game of "Where's Waldo?" The group of travelers grew as we walked through the streets, and finally we reached the minibus at 6pm.
The nice man on the motorbike screamed at us to put our luggage in the back of the minibus. He grabbed my bag while it was still buckled around my waist and tried to throw it in the back. I had to yell and say "It's still attached!" but he didn't seem to mind. I am surprised I didn't end up in the luggage hold with my bag. I wasn't the only one he did this to either, there were other poor girls who were almost chucked in the front or back with bags still on their bodies. What a nutter. Meanwhile all this is happening there is a lady trying to sell us mangoes and bananas. Oh, Hanoi..
So we all pile on the minibus, and wait for a few more people..they get on and bags get thrown about. The minibus is rammed full of people and bags, and by the time it's time to depart there were no seats and people standing for the 45 minute bus ride to the main station. When we arrive to the station, we are split up into 2 buses, one for Vientiane and one for Luang Pranbang.
We get to the bus and realize that our backpacks will be joining us on board, as there are satellite dishes and boxes of cans of cooking oil in the cargo hold. Honestly, who knows what the heck is in the cargo hold...but not our bags. We slip off our shoes and place them in a plastic bag and board the bus, which seems to be comfortable... More comfortable than our bus from Nha Trang to Hoi An, seat wise at least.
We had to climb over backpacks, giant packages wrapped in burlap bags, boxes, and whatever else they were carrying to get to our seats. I climb into a top bunk seat and Paul ran off to have one last quick bathroom break before we jetted off.. The little man who helped the driver kept trying to get me to move to the back of the bus and I refused because I didn't want to get split up from Paul. He finally understood when I showed him Paul's stuff and said "no I want to sit with my husband" and left me alone. He was screaming at people and being generally unpleasant pretty much the entire trip.
Mistake number two was when Paul returned from the bathroom and then we decided to move a few seats back after all.. There was a seat with tons of thick pads (we assumed more cargo) in it where no one was sitting, so we got the seats behind it because we figured no one would be sitting there to lean back on our legs. Ha! How silly we were. Our small, feeble western minds.
So we were off... Chatting with other travelers we had befriended on our minibus journey, relaxing, and thinking that despite the crazy screaming onboard staff and the long duration of travel time, this trip may actually be alright. We even stopped for dinner and a rest just a couple hours after departure! Granted, it was a truck stop and the food wasn't the best, but you can't really go wrong with rice, greens and tofu.. The little voice in the back of my mind told me to eat real food now, because of what I had read about other "bus from hell" trips. But so far, the trip had been good, and I thought maybe those other posts were just people being dramatic.
I purchased some prescription strength sleep aids in Sapa for our train ride home after the snoring incident, and thought it would be helpful for the sleeper bus as well. It's hard to sleep on buses and trains, especially in Vietnam. After our dinner got down and the lights went off inside the bus, I took some of my sleeping pills, curled up under the fleece blanket, and settled down for a nice long sleep...
Then 2 AM rolled around. Magically more cargo was being loaded into the bus. The pads that were in the seat in front of us were taken and put on the floor and on the second level of the sleeper seats in the back of the bus- which made a makeshift bed. There was a platform where those who had the very back seats could lay their legs out,while bags other luggage was beneath on the first level. Along with cargo on top of the bus, under the bus, and in the aisle, 15 more people, all local Vietnamese men, climbed aboard. The crazy man that tried to get me to move began waking up other westerners and making them move to the seats in the back of the bus. There were people everywhere.. Sitting on the stuff in the aisle, and sitting on the platform in the back of the bus, right next to us. I don't think these men had showered in days and they were all speaking extremely loudly and woke up everyone on the bus. All the people who had paid $50 per person were an afterthought on this bus.. What mattered was whatever goods they were transporting and the local people who climbed in... I'm fine with riding on a local bus, but not when I was sold a "nice soft sleeper bus" and probably paid 10 times what these locals paid.
These guys had their feet in the faces of thepoor guys in the back of the bus...
People and stuff EVERYWHERE
People and stuff EVERYWHEREI turned on my trusty iPod, slipped my eyemask over my eyes, and managed to sleep for 4 hours before I awoke to my bladder screaming at me. Ah yes, the bus we were sold did not have an onboard toilet. As gross as many of these are, I would have looooooved to have had an onboard toilet for this journey. But alas, we were on the bus from hell. It was 6 am and we hadn't stopped in 10 hours except to pick up random people, cargo, and whatever else. I thought I was going to get a kidney infection when I had to wait another 2 hours before the bus came to a halt on the side of the road. It must be nice to be male and just be able to go to the bathroom wherever you want. But for me, I had to stumble over bags and crap on the bus, then seek out a bush to pop a squat..which isn't really a big deal, but this coupled with everything else that had happened so far made it a lot worse. I thought my bladder was going to explode and I was in agony! This incident made me avoid drinking water for the duration of the rest of the trip. I figured I'd rather be dehydrated than chance peeing in my pants or getting a kidney infection.
We putted along the winding roads for another hour or so and made it to the Vietnamese border. We had to get off the bus and walk to the immigration counter where they give you an exit stamp. I took advantage of the facilities in the office like 3 times due to paranoia caused from the lack of stops thus far. This whole process took about 45-1hour minutes, in beaurecratic Vietnamese fashion..you would think exiting would be easy. Once we got our exit stamp, we walked about 1km to the Laos border, where we were greeted by kind immigration officers. They took us to a room, gave us a form, and we waited maybe 10 minutes before we had a visa in hand.. $30 and a passport photo will get you a visa on arrival in Laos. I was just happy to see a nice smiling immigration officer after dealing with the hardlining Vietnamese guys.
We stretched our legs, used one last bathroom break, and reboarded the bus. We were hoping our new friends who had hopped on would be disembarking at the border, but no such luck. They all climbed back on and made themselves comfortable in the non-seat areas of the bus. One guy kept leaning on Paul, and after what we had already endured, he was not going to put up with it. I think the local guy understood not to mess around with someone that's about twice his size and stopped using Paul as a seat back. Then all of a sudden I smelled something gross.. I turned around and saw one of the locals cheesy disgusting feet were by my head on the seat. I thought there were 2 German guys behind us, but the crazy bus guy must had made them move in the middle of the night to accomodate the local guys that were now sitting there. I turned around to the foot guy and yelled "No way!" and he put his feet down. This went on a few times, and finally Paul scared the crap out of him the 5th time I had to say something.. I don't know who these guys were or where they came from but they had no respect for anyone.
Also throughout this journey, there would be random times when loud Vietnamese music would blast through the speakers, or a movie with people singing would come on the TV. I had my earplugs in and made a pretty good dent in "Gone with the Wind", which I am loving right now. We made our way through the winding roads and our bellies began to growl, as we hadn't eaten since 8 pm the night before and hours were slowly ticking by.. We stopped to drop off cargo at random places, on the side of the road for bathroom breaks, but by 2 o'clock there was still no sign of nourishment coming our way besides 2 smashed bananas, a couple of apples I bought before we left, and a few multigrain cookies I had from a few days ago. Paul had already eaten all of his chips, and we were starving. I was still scared to drink water because I didn't know what our stopping schedule would be like. On previous buses, we stopped about every 3 hours at proper places, like a gas station or a restaurant. But this was no ordinary bus. Haha!
Not only were we starving and thirsty but scared to drink, but hot as well. I guess this bus has seen better days, because everytime we made an ascent up the hill, the driver turned off the air conditioning. So we only had downhill or flat road AC. All those bodies and goods and no ac makes for a really fun trip.
Around 3 o'clock we reached a small town in Laos and the driver announced "Restaurant!" By this point, I was past the hunger pangs but knew I needed to eat. So we sat at this restaurant that was actually pretty good.. I had noodle soup, but was still paranoid to drink the broth after my human rights to stop for a bathroom break were violated. We stopped at a little shop and picked up a few more things and a small bottle of water and boarded the bus again. Some of our local friends left near the small town where we stopped, which freed up some space on the bus. I had thought we were only a few hours away from our destination, but again, I was proven wrong.
Around 8pm we made another stop, this time at an actual bathroom (a squatty toilet but a toilet!) There was a little store next to the bathroom that sold beer. After being on the bus officially 25 hours already, I signaled to Paul to buy a beer and he walked out with 2 large Beerlaos. I was nervous at the amount of liquid inside those bottles, but at this point I didn't care. The beer tasted delicious and made me giggle.. I could have probably made friends with those guys who shared our seats with us! Paul and I gave a "cheers" and figured we didn't have much longer on the bus to go. I drank my beer slowly and ended up falling asleep when it was gone.. I awoke to find we were still on the bus, on dark mountain roads, with no civilization in sight. It was 10pm by now, and we had been sitting on this godforsaken bus for 27 hours.
I spent the next hour and a half looking out the window at the stars, and seeing small brush fires sweeping across the mountains. It's the burning season in Laos, where they burn all the underbrush before the planting season. Finally we began making our way down into a valley, and I began to see the lights of Luang Prabang. We made it!!! We screeched into the bus station, and there was nothing in the town open and only one tuk-tuk driver waiting for us. Of course, the bus crew unloaded all of the cargo from the bottom and top of the bus and whatever else was important first, and then threw our bags out the door.
The tuktuk was was a 10 seater, but we managed to fit 15 people plus all of our backpacks in it. Paul sat up front with the driver, and he said that at some points the driver was making some nervous faces. The tuk tuk was swaying back and forth as we puttered along the main road from the station to the center of town. Just a short 5 minute ride, and we made it. The driver dropped us off in the middle of the main intersection, in the dark and then left us with no direction of where we needed to go to reach our accomodation. Another driver pointed us down a main road, so we started walking trying to read road signs and see which way our place was.. There are like 253 hotels in Luang Pranbang, so they are all over the place.. Finally, we decided to just get another tuktuk as we didn't know where we were or which way to go and it was almost midnight. We flagged down a tuktuk and it was the same guy who told us to walk down the road we were on... He magically could understand us now, as he was getting business from us, and took us to our guesthouse which was the exact opposite way of the way we were walking... After being on a bus for 30 hours you don't want to be messed around with by a taxi driver. Paul was fuming at this guy.... He told him "You are a horrible person. You need to go tell all those people they are walking the wrong way". It turned out all of the people we met on the bus had hostels on the same road as our place, and that guy was sending them the completely wrong way, in the middle of the night! What a jerk!
Thankfully, everyone else minus the taxi and bus people we have encountered so far in vietnam/Laos have been lovely. I feel like you have to be a certain kind of person to be a taxi driver... We have encountered more jerks than decent ones when it comes to taxis during our travels. I can't paint them all with the same brush, though. There are good people in the world who aren't always trying to rip you off!
We can now say that we have endured the longest, most hellacious bus ride to date. I have no regrets, as it makes for a good story. The only bad thing is that the air conditioning filtration system on that bus was horrible (you could see black stuff in the vents...yuck), and both of us have a stupid cough again. That may have been down to the fact those local people were coughing all over us as well. I think we may buy one of those mask things that everyone wears here for the next bus ride we have to take.... Which will be a 16 hour bus ride to Vientiane! In 2 days! Wish us luck!
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