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Other entries in Sam Neua

Four Strange Days

Our intention was to catch a bus from Nong Khiaw to Vieng Thang, the next town of any respectable size about six hours away by bus. We had been told that there was a minibus that left early in the morning in that direction, but no one could tell us where it actually stopped, so the next morning we got up at dawn to be sure to catch it. If there is one thing we've never gotten used to, it's the apparent lack of knowledge by anyone, including the people at the bus station, of the timetables for buses. "Early morning" in this case meant about noon as far as we could tell, but more than likely it was when the minibus got full. The minibus is actually like a pickup truck with a covered bed and two benches running lengthwise along the back. The sides are open, but often have sheets of plastic that can be lowered in the case of rain or cold. Like most other countries we've visited, the amount of people, supplies, animals and debris piled on the things makes them look like something out of the Beverly Hillbillies, but to most people they're the only game in town.

We were sitting on the side of the road in the morning sun considering our options, when out of the blue, Andrea, the most cautious, thoroughly prepared person in the world, suggested we hitch. Excuse me? Who are you and what have you done with my wife? It's a good thing we were already sitting down when she pulled that one out of her How-To-Confuse-Brian bag. Who said this trip wouldn't change us? Next thing you know we'll have mismatched forks in our house.

After a thorough quiz to determine that Andrea was not a clever alien imposter and once I was able to stand, we decided to wave down the next vehicle that came along. The moment turned out to be decidedly anticlimactic as we slowly realized that in order to hitch, there must be vehicles going by, and as far as we could tell no one in Laos owns a car. The next vehicle would probably be the bus that left at noon. However, after an hour or so a small truck did come by and the driver was happy to take us and have us help pay for gas. It didn't look too dangerous since there were two women and a small child in the cab with him, but we stayed vigilant anyway just in case it was a set up. The driver was only going about half way to Vieng Thang, to a town called Vieng Kong, but we figured we'd just catch another ride for the rest of the trip since it was still early in the day.

So there we were on a beautiful morning, sitting in the back of a truck with our heads sticking out the side, the crisp northern Laos air making it feel like a fall day. We were rebels, loners, flying by the seat of our pants right across Laos. We were hitching, and let me tell you, for a couple who Purells their bus seats, that's about as close to Kerouac as we'll ever get. Our spirits were high as we drove through the gorgeous steep jungle hillsides, mist rising as the sun began to reach the valleys below. We passed through several small ethnic Blue Hmong villages of thatched huts on stilts, with people out on the street going about their daily business, many stopping to wave as we drove past. Children, it seems, are quite a resource in these villages, as many of them were either doing errands or helping their parents with them. It wasn't uncommon to see a woman with a large bundle of sticks on her back followed by a child with a small bundle of sticks on her own, or a five year old with an infant on her back. It's also quite touching to see a father with his machete walking along with his four year old son carrying his own little machete. After seeing this truly unique bond, we've decided that we'll be giving matching machetes to all of our friends with children upon our return.

Later that morning we arrived in the village of Vieng Kong, with a whopping population of at least a couple of hundred people. The town was stretched out for about a half mile along the highway at the bottom of a valley with a river running through it. This seemed to make sense because the valley walls were steep, and it also gave everyone river front property to do their washing, etc. However, there's no real town center so people tend to do their socializing in the middle of the road. Throughout our travels, we have noticed in several Buddhist countries that people will go to great lengths to avoid conflict, for instance, telling you that something is just down the road when it isn't because they think it's the answer you want to hear. A good example of this on this particular day was when at the far side of town our driver pulled over, parked, got out and left, which we guessed was a polite way of saying he had arrived when you don't know the language.

We were standing on the side of the road somewhere on the far edge of town, next to a huge pile of grass which for some unexplained reason people kept showing up and adding to throughout the day. Across the street there was what appeared to be a small restaurant with a lot of people bustling around carrying things to and fro. Since it seems most restaurants in Laos have no walls and we had nothing else to do, we sat on our backpacks watching the activity across the street and hoped a car would come along soon. As the day began to get warmer, a young man came out of the house we were in front of and set up small chairs in the shade for us to sit in.

Things picked up after about an hour when, without warning, the tremendously overpowering sound of Laotian dance music came thundering out of the restaurant. The next thing you know everyone across the street is cracking open beers and shouting to each other over the music. Soon after, some of them beckoned for us to join them for lunch, so across the street we went. We left our bags on the side of the road, but it wasn't a worry, first of all, no one's going to run very quickly with two backpacks full of suntan lotion and handiwipes, and second, with no cars going by, how far could they get?

As a rule, we generally try to save any heavy drinking and dancing until after 12 noon, especially on a Tuesday. Despite the best attempts of the folks in the restaurant, we kept our beer intake to a minimum but enjoyed an excellent lunch and hung around for a couple of hours hoping unsuccessfully that a car would come by. At least it beat sitting in the sun. To give you an idea of exactly how local a restaurant it was, I had to wait for a guy to get out of the shower to use the bathroom. The shower was a bucket of water and the bathroom looked like it had been hosed down when I got in, but you get the idea.

After a couple of hours some of our new drinking buddies indicated to us that there would be no more cars that day, and being that they seemed to be setting up tables in the middle of the street, we were inclined to believe them. We were told there was a place to stay on the other side of town so we got our things and went to check it out. The place turned out to be what could generously be described as a guest house, but we preferred the term Dangerously Leaning Wooden Hut. Inside this structure were four rooms, or more accurately, partitions, with cracks between the wall boards big enough to shake hands through. In each partition there was a solid one foot of space around a mat of some sort which had clearly never been washed, and a hole/window in the outside wall with a little door on it you could shut to keep anything larger than a small dog from getting in. There was a single light bulb strategically located as to provide a modicum of light to each room, and an outhouse in back with a barrel of water next to it to wash. It was a new low, but you couldn't beat the price of two dollars, and we weren't about to tell them that considering the alternative of sleeping in the road, we'd have paid double. As an added bonus, the kind woman who ran the place told us there was a bus that came through town at about 2am and she would stay up and flag it down for us so we could get some sleep. We didn't have the heart to tell her we'd be up anyway, probably standing.

Later that evening, putting off our inevitable night-in-a-hut as long as possible, we headed down the road toward our partying restaurant in search of food. It turned out the reason for all the activity earlier in the day was that they had been setting up for a wedding, and half the town was there in the middle of the street. You know, we've seen people in many countries make the most use out of what they have, and it warmed our hearts to see the people of Vieng Kong, Laos have the good sense to use a major highway as a dance floor. They beckoned us to join once again, but we deferred. We think it's pretty much a universal rule that if you are a foreigner and spontaneously invited to a local wedding, your hosts are going to get you very drunk, and we didn't want to miss our next chance out of town. Instead, we chose the more responsible but much less fun option of retreating back to our guest house, finding a couple of baguettes to eat before the caretaker turned off the only light. Later that night, a couple of people who must have come for the wedding stumbled in, greeting us through the wall cracks before passing out and snoring for the next eight hours.

True to her word, the caretaker came by at 2 am, but only to tell us that she was going to bed since the bus never came. It didn't matter anyway, we were just standing around waiting like her. At about 4am we heard the distant rumble of a vehicle approaching, and being reasonably sure it was the bus we wanted, I told Andrea to grab our backpacks and went out to the road to wave it down. The bus slowed as it approached, and as it came into view I realized to my horror that it was the reincarnation of our bus from Nepal (see entry: day 67). The driver and the people vomiting out the windows were different, and I don't know how it got across Bangladesh, Myanmar and Thailand, but this was the bus. It pulled to a stop, and as the door opened I was hit in the face with the overwhelming and regrettably familiar odor of 85 carsick people crammed into a 45 seat bus. People were literally laying over each other, flopped about the cabin three people deep. We're guessing that most buses without shock absorbers bounce less in the front, because there were layers of people filling every inch of the area around the driver and door, making me actually have to step on people to get a better look of the back. As I stood there, stepping on two people, taking the scene in and trying to think of what to do next, Andrea stuck her head in, took one look and said three words to me, the first one being "No", the last one being "way", and promptly departed the bus. I paused for a moment, not being used to feeling a great sense of relief after having been sworn at by my wife, shrugged at the driver and followed her back to our hut, where we sat on the edge of the bed until light shown through the cracks in the walls.

Later that morning, after a refreshing couple of buckets of water to the head, we were optimistic that this would be the day that a vehicle would pass through town headed towards Vieng Thang. Our resolve to move along became even stronger when we realized that this was apparently slaughter-a-pig-behind-the-guesthouse day, and the repeated frantic squealing behind us was not unlike fingernails on a blackboard, except pigs don't die when you drag your fingernails across a blackboard. Plus, now we couldn't go out back to use the outhouse. At some point it became unbearable to watch pigs get herded around the side of our building and we decided to get proactive and look around town for a way out. Only one of us could go since someone had to stay with the bags, and since I know how to cheat at a coin toss, Andrea got stuck with the squealing pigs while I went off to plan our escape.

While walking back to the edge of town, as I passed a building a man greeted me in English and we struck up a conversation. He was a local man of about 45 who owned a restaurant, which was difficult to see since there wasn't a sign or anything, but perhaps that's one of the benefits of living in a small town. He was also a wealth of information, informing me of why we hadn't seen any cars. Apparently, the town we were in, Vieng Kong, was closer to the major city of Luang Prabang (in the west), and all vehicles entering town from that direction tended to go back that way. The town of Vieng Thang, which we were trying to get to, is closer to the major city of Sam Neua (in the east), and all vehicles entering Vieng Thang tended to come from and go back in that direction. The 150 Kilometers between Vieng Kong and Vieng Thang were a veritable automobile no man's land. According to the restaurant owner there was but one vehicle that entered the void: the bus from Nepal. Well, I couldn't just go back and tell that to Andrea without some sort of alternative, so we (actually, mostly me) hatched a plan to either bribe or highjack the daily minibus that came from Nong Khiaw. At least it was something. I went back to get Andrea who was by now rocking back and forth with her hands over her ears, singing, grabbed her and our bags and we walked back to the far edge of town. There was one redeeming part of staying behind, she informed me. She got to watch some guys build an entire restaurant in an hour by putting up some poles, hanging a tarp and bringing in some tables. Perhaps it was for the pig feast that night, but we didn't intend to be there to find out.

Once again we sat by the side of the road waiting for time to pass, our new friend practicing his English while simultaneously getting a big laugh out of trying to make his neighbors infant suck his nipple. It's not the sort of thing I tend to do in front of new acquaintances, but hey, maybe he misinterpreted the term "metrosexual" and was trying to impress us. He told us of how difficult it was to find work in Laos, his dream being to make it to the USA and work for three years, make a lot of money and come home to retire. Considering he was the only English speaking person in a dead-end town, we figured if he just put a sign on his restaurant he'd get every western traveler dumb enough to do what we did, but alas, who are we to mess with another man's dream?

Although our friend told us he'd wait for the daily minibus from Nong Khiaw to speak with the driver on our behalf, at about 1pm he suddenly decided he needed a nap, about the time we expected the minibus to arrive. His plan turned out to be brilliant however, as sure enough, 10 minutes after he left us the minibus came rambling into view. We weren't about to let this one pass, so I stood in the middle of the road while Andrea went to gently wake our friend. We were in luck, a German guy, his Croatian girlfriend and two Korean guys had made the same mistake and were in the back of the minibus unaware that they were about to live their own personal version of the movie Groundhog Day. One look at the desperation in our faces, and they quickly agreed to split the cost of whatever it took to keep the vehicle moving toward Vieng Thang. Not being in the mood to haggle, we quickly came to an agreement for about five times the cost of our stay at the dangerously-leaning-wooden-hut, a bargain considering the circumstances. Andrea and I jumped in and off we went, having escaped the black hole of Vieng Kong a day later on the exact minibus we would have come in on the previous day. It should come as no surprise that besides supplying me with the next 50 odd years worth of jokes, we decided to disregard hitching as a viable form of transportation for the remainder of the trip.

The five hour ride to Vieng Thang was gloriously uneventful, save for our introduction to what I will term "the Laotian  breakdown" some time in late afternoon. During a Laotian Breakdown, like your average automobile breakdown, the vehicle ceases to function in the capacity for which it was intended. Unlike your average automobile breakdown, the driver ceases to function in the capacity for which he was intended. This involves a great deal of sitting around waiting for inspiration, help, or maybe some spare parts to fall from the sky. Considering we were in the Bermuda Triangle of Laos, help didn't seem like it was going to be an option. Eventually our driver figured he had to do something, and after an hour or so under the hood we were back on our way, once again watching the villages slip by, people waving as we drove past. We had to slow to a crawl in one town we went through because of the crowd of people in the street. We thought it might be another wedding, but as we passed we saw the entire town crowded around a television set on a table in the middle of the street. A long cable went to a satellite dish on the other side of the road, apparently positioned for the best reception. We had no idea of where the electricity to run it was coming from, but judging from the looks on the people's faces, this was their first introduction to the electronic babysitter. I bet if we showed up a couple of weeks later everyone would be lying around in La-Z-Boy's drinking beer and eating Cheet-O's, but we decided not to because we like our current vision of Laos better.

We pulled into Vieng Thang after dusk, the evening having gotten decidedly chilly especially in the back of a truck. Our driver brought us to a guest house which was clean and looked pretty new and supposedly had a shared hot shower. The room was big and cold with cement walls and another toilet stall like the place at the border we stayed in, and the bed had a mosquito net that smelled like body odor. The blanket had a some sort of psychotic bunny design and judging by the material was in no way flame retardant. Nevertheless, it was a lot better than the previous night's accommodation, so we took the mosquito net down and made sure not to light any matches.

The owners were happy to accommodate their only guests, and were even more excited when Andrea and I told them we'd be staying two nights. Since we hadn't slept in a couple of days, we weren't in any rush to get up early the next day and the bus to Sam Neua left at about 6:30am. Plus, we wanted to spend some time looking around, and since we were apparently the first humans to successfully cross the void between Vieng Kong and Vieng Thang without an overnight bus, we wanted to bask in our glory for a while, greeting civilians, signing autographs and the like. After a strange dinner of Ramen noodles in what felt like a Laotian truck stop, we headed to our room after the German guy started asking around for opium. As easy as it may have been to come by, opium is still illegal, Laos is a communist country, and people tend to disappear for a very long time when they do the wrong thing in communist countries.

The next morning we got up late and went out to walk around and see the town. No wonder the prior night's restaurant looked like a truck stop, the whole town looked like a truck stop. We passed the German/Croatian couple who had, not surprisingly, missed the bus and were sitting on the side of the road hoping a vehicle would come along. After walking the length of the town, which took about 15 minutes, we spent the rest of the day at the much more scenic edge of town hanging out by a hot spring watching people come to wash their clothes. It was not an exciting day, but we got some excellent tips on spot removal.

Upon our return to the guesthouse, it was a little unsettling to learn that the German/Croatian couple had not made it out of town, because like Vieng Kong, no vehicles had actually come through. This put us in the strange bedfellows position of knowing it would be easier to hire a vehicle with them to get out of town if we had to, while being careful not to be associated too closely with them so if worse came to worst, we wouldn't be spending a sizeable portion of our remaining years eating cockroaches in solitary confinement. We decided it would be best to be sure to catch the bus the next morning to Sam Neua, lest we get stuck again watching laundry day, all day, every day.

We awoke the next morning with plenty of time to catch the bus to Sam Neua and headed directly to the bus stop while it was still dark. As we approached the stop it dawned upon us as the vehicle came into view. It was the Nepal bus. It had come from Luang Prabang, through Nong Khiaw and Vieng Thang, like it did every night, and it was ready to move on to Sam Neua. We knew we were going to have to take it, but worse, it knew we were going to have to take it, and it mocked us. After resigning ourselves to the horror, we discovered it was to our great fortune that a fair contingent of passengers had disembarked at Vieng Thang, leaving an unbelievable four seats open. Andrea took a seat about half way up towards the front, while I, in some sort of cruel poetic justice, sat in the second to last row, in the exact same seat that I was forced to sit in on the ride through Nepal. The German/Croatian couple sat in the last row, which was a comfort since I hadn't seen them vomit in the minibus the other day, and I figured I had a solid chance of not being surprised from behind while moving.

We departed in the predawn light on a highway which the guidebook listed as "well maintained dirt road." We beg to differ. "Well maintained" would imply that someone is actually maintaining it, besides which, the road was actually paved, not dirt, as it seemed to have been for many years. Many, many years. So many years, in fact, that it would be better if it was dirt.

Throughout the morning we lurched along, the bus repeatedly crawling slowly up a mountainside before careening down the other, barely in control and flinging people from side to side, the one ton of material strapped to the roof raising the center of gravity on the vehicle to dangerous levels, causing the bus to teeter precariously over the mountainside at each twist and turn. It wasn't long before heads began hanging out the window, people emptying themselves of any remnants of food that were left from the previous 12 hours. The refreshing smell of Andrea's minty balm wafted back to me as she applied it under her nostrils in a desperate attempt not to reach critical mass and leap to freedom off a mountainside. We discovered that one of the few advantages to joining the bus half way through the trip was that most of the people in the bus, having already experienced the first 12 hours of hell, had nothing left in their stomachs to lose. At each bump we watched the roof of the bus flex under the immense volume of the cargo strapped to the top, wondering what use anyone would actually get out of the four escape hatches above us in the likely event the bus plummeted off a cliff. The sound of tinny local music floated throughout the cabin like the dust coming through the cracks in the floor, and the faded plastic flowers hanging from the rails only added to the ambiance. It was probably just as well the meager squirt of the windshield washer did nothing to assist the one working wiper, it didn't look like the driver was paying attention anyway.

Upon glancing to my right, I nervously noticed the man next to me, who was panting, sweating, swallowing excessively and pressing his face against the half open window, was about to join his regurgitating compatriots. Salvation came in the form of a flat tire, and once the driver stopped playing with the radio long enough to notice, the bus shuddered to a stop. The passengers had plenty of time to empty the vehicle and lie around collecting themselves while the driver unloaded most of the contents on top of the bus to get to the spare. After another hour or so, we were on our way.

About half way to Sam Neua we came to the junction of another road that went south to Phonsavan, and the German/Croatian couple motioned to get off. There was nothing but a few thatched huts at the intersection, and as we pulled away we watched out the back as the couple stood in the road, looking a little concerned that they may have just made a very big mistake. As the sun rose higher in the sky, we spent the rest of the morning watching the half conscious passengers heads loll back and forth in unison at each twist and turn of the road. We arrived in Sam Neua by noon having upheld our resolution to never take another bus over eight hours, and it only took us four days to do it.

We had wanted to go to Sam Neua because there was little written in our guidebook about it other than it was a dusty town with nothing to see. Imagine our surprise when we discovered that it was a dusty town with nothing to see. No wonder the guidebook glazed over it. The only reason a westerner might visit would be in transit to Vietnam, just a couple of hours away by bus. We, of course, were not going to Vietnam, so we set about to see the town. The area around the town was rolling hills and rice fields, the roads were wide and dusty, and although it was the middle of the week, everything seemed to be closed. The air was cool and moist due to the effect of fog settling in between the hills each evening until the sun burned it off late each morning. The people of the town were of mixed ethnicity, with many Vietnamese along with Chinese populating the town along with Laotians. There was actually a tourist office listed in the book, but it wasn't where the book said it was, and when we found it, it too was closed even though it was the middle of the day.

There was a pretty nice guesthouse considering what we had just been through, and after wandering through town we realized that our biggest problem would be food. We walked into one restaurant only to be told they were closed. We eventually were able to find an open restaurant, even though the owner didn't seem too happy to be disturbed from his watching television, and had the good fortune to have our choice of:

1. bamboo rat stew
2. squirrel roast
3. fried sparrow
4. jungle fowl BBQ
5. steamed/fried wasp.

The oddest part of the place were the several posters hanging about the restaurant depicting tables of western food such as roast turkey, vegetables, fruit, breads and wine. Maybe the concept was that if we looked at the posters while eating we wouldn't notice the fried wasp on our plate. In any case, we got them to make us some soup after feigning we were vegetarians, which we would have been if they made us eat anything on the menu. It was shortly after our meal, only two hours after arriving in Sam Neua, that we decided we were leaving the next day.

That evening, amidst an unexplained barrage of fireworks exploding in the streets, we set out to find one more meal hoping something else was open besides the place we had eaten lunch. We didn't get far before we passed an open area with about 40 people eating, drinking and celebrating who insisted we join them. This time it was after 12 noon, and since we had nowhere else to go, we headed on over and had a seat. Several good things came out of this fortuitous meeting. First, the food we were eating we didn't have to order off a menu, so we didn't actually know what we were eating, even though we're pretty positive that there's nothing else that looks like chicken feet. Plus, I still can't figure out what that cold, gelatinous goo is that the Chinese seem to so enjoy, although I guess you could say the same thing about McDonalds. Anyway, we also found out that this night was the beginning of Chinese New Year, hence the celebration and people blowing things up. We enjoyed several obligatory shots of a local brew appropriately named "lao-lao," hung out with our new friends and celebrated Chinese New Year in style, somewhere in a small town deep in Southeast Asia.

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