Border Crossing - Vietnam to Laos

Getting the bus moving

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Well.  Binh's Tours.  Well.  We got back to the office after our enjoyable stay in Sapa to find that forgetful-guy had not really done much work on our refund.  Michelle decided to camp out in the office until forgetful-guy could produce the manager...f-g assured her that he wouldn't be back until 5...blah, blah, table-pounding, yelling, blah.  5 minutes later the manager arrived.  He seemed worried.

We explained our situation again (we'd been sent on the wrong tour, and the one we were sent on was $110 cheaper), and it was, of course, the first he'd heard of it.  Blah, blah, table-pounding, yelling from both sides, two phone calls with an awful lot of laughing on manager's part, blah.  It wasn't his fault, the busdriver or tour guide or someone had just pocketed the rest of the money and sent us on the wrong tour.  THAT GUY, would only return in 3 days, conveniently two days after we were booked to leave the country.  More yelling, standing up, threatened tears, blah.  Offers $50 refund if we go away now.  More yelling, determination that he owns three of these operations and is in fact not as poor as he claims, Susan and Michelle leave with $50 and Michelle feels that her soul has been hurt by the hard line she took with a guy that almost certainly cheated them.  Needless to say we were not surprised when we arrived at the bus station having paid TRIPLE the price of the other passengers (for a "Super VIP" bus) and ending up on what we came to refer to as the "black market goods-running" public bus.  There were just too many unmarked packages on that bus crammed into too many secret compartments.

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The air on the bus was one of distinct hostility.  The driver and other passengers resented the foreigners (us and four others) and we resented the fact that we'd overpaid.  We spent a very uncomfortable night listening to awful karaoke played at ear-splitting volumes.  This was mostly the Israeli girls' fault, as they'd complained about the noise and the driver turned it up out of spite.  We were woken up periodically by the irate driver who smack us awake if he needed the seat next to us.  Michelle made the mistake of growling a "no!" at him, and he yelled in Vietnamese for ten seconds or so until she moved.  As the sun rose we arrived at the Laos border, and we started practicing our Laos.  This endeared us to the driver and a few passengers, who thawed slightly by laughing at our pronunciation and correcting us from time to time.  Frowns turned upside down people!  There was no thawing toward the Israeli girls though...they had continued complaining and were NOBODYs favorite people by this point.  The remaining two foreigners were two Austrian guys dressed in Sarongs and hemp shirts...distinctly shaggy.  The sarongs got laughs from the women on the bus, and the two guys were pretty easygoing, so by the time we made it through immigration the atmosphere was practically jovial.  Or at least not openly hostile. We all held our breaths through two customs checks of the bus, but the "random" box checks yielded only Ritz crackers...a lot of money changed hands though...and prior to the checks there was some scrambling to move some of the lumpier packages to the under-bus compartments.

Laos stunned us with beauty right from the border...greenery covered mountains, a full 4 degrees cooler than Vietnam and empty, well-maintained roads.  We rolled along pretty quietly until we reached a line of stopped vehicles and were shooed off the bus by the driver's assistant.  We all wandered up to the front of the line of vehicles, a mix of scooters, pick-ups, four-by-four trucks, semis and food carts to find that the bridge had washed completely out.  Several vehicles had driven into the mud-slick ditch to make a run at the river itself, but the process was proceeding at Laos speed.  Pretty laid-back.  Susan and Michelle decided to take advantage of the food carts and picked up some sticky rice and "meat"-sticks.  Once again, Michelle vehemently declared that the "meat" was pork.  It's pork, ok?!  This declaration was getting more difficult to back up given that one of the stuck-trucks was filled with 100 or so dogs packed ready for meat-packing plants.  We were definitely eating pork though.  It was delicious.  Bacon-y in fact.

Our luck at taking the public bus turned out to be more good than the very bad we'd originally thought.   Given the tight schedule of black-market smuggling operations, our crew was quite motivated to get us through, and they busily re-packed our "completely legal and paid-for goods" to lighten the load on the front tires.  The driver's assistant wandered through the muddy ditch selecting the least-deep route and occasionally picking small boulders out of the way.  (Boulders reduce traction).   Driver's assistant observed the goings-on at the river to assess the best way to navigate the waist-deep water.  Two 4x4 trucks (wussy little Toyota Hiluxes) drove in at ramming speed...the first one flooded and had to be dragged out by twenty shirtless Lao men with chains, the second barely made it.  Driver's assistant was undaunted.  The bus made a run...and got stuck fifty yards short by an unseen boulder.  The entire crew slid under with machetes to hack the bus free.  Meanwhile the "puppy truck", (in no way carrying food-dogs) made a run and tipped to nearly 45 degrees.  This wedged our "black market goods-running" bus in!  Trapped!  Driver's Assistant was irate.

The Israeli girls began to cry a little...they were new to Asia and hadn't encountered these situations before, but the rest of the passengers divided into friendly groups.  Men stood and pondered courses of action, women sat around sharing "meat" and rice.  Michelle befriended one older woman, helping her off the bridge, open to pedestrian traffic thanks to a single plank of wood suspended across the battered pilings.  Eventually our bus just decided to squeeze past the "puppy truck", taking out a section of jungle, and hit the river full speed.  The front bumper was conveniently detachable, and was removed to improve clearance over the rocky river bed.  Success!  Before the passengers could photograph anything the bus was through.  We were underway again...though not without several offers of exorbitant fares from "Super VIP" passengers whose prissy busses had given up. Thanks Binh!

The rest of the trip was pretty unremarkable, except our pious stop at a Buddhist shrine to thanks the ancestors and transport deities for the safe passage.  When you're a black-market smuggler, you can never pray too much.