Eventful journey to Luang Nam Tha

The woman in the shop in Bon Donchai was to flag down the local bus for us but got distracted by her daughter and the bus zoomed past. We all had a bit of a panic because there is only 1 bus a day and Bon Donchai doesn’t have places for 6 people to stay, it literally consists of a shop and a couple of hut houses.....so, our only option was to flag passing vehicles, one of which eventually stopped. It was an open backed truck and the two guys in the front said they were heading the same way and happily agreed to let the 6 mad falang (foreigners) sit in the back. It was to be a very long journey......

A highway connecting China and Thailand is being built and it cuts straight through a lot of the Laos country side and it is this ‘road’ which we were travelling on to Luang Nam Tha – none of it is tarmacced and it is all just like a building site so sitting on the plank wood floor in the back of the truck wasn’t very comfortable. We discovered when we stopped at a roadside restaurant and chatted to our 2 Lao drivers that the 6 hour journey was actually going to take 7. So we knuckled down and endured the journey as best we could. It was going pretty well, a few of us were even nodding off when we got to a particularly bad stretch of road, more like a mud track and we got stuck going up a hill. All of us hopped out and began to push, we’d just got the truck moving when it started sliding sideways and almost went off the side of the road and down the 60 foot incline - we were well and truly stuck in the mud and blocking the road at 10pm in the pitch black in the middle of the jungle – oh the fun! Our Lao drivers were quite concerned about us and insisted there was nothing more we could do, they had no phone signal, so we just had to wait for some other vehicles to come along – a rare occurrence on Lao roads at that time of night. We were all settling down in our sleeping bags when eventually another truck came along and then another. The drivers came to inspect, and actually seemed more interested in the 6 people trying to sleep in the back! They started digging the truck out and after a big effort by everyone we got the truck moving at about midnight. Got to Luang Nam Tha at about 1:30 am – almost 11 hours after we started!