May 28: Travel Day, Luang Prabang to Vientiane

I had arranged a tuk tuk driver two nights ago at the night market, so he was waiting for me when I stumbled out of the guest house at 7:15 to catch the 8:00 bus back to Vientiane. From my scribbled notes taken on the sometimes-bumpy bus:

-Plenty of Thai music videos, including one starring a guy who looks and acts a lot like Elton John. There's a gorilla in his video.

-Wildlife report (for Mom): dogs, cats, pigs with black hair, turkeys, an uncountable number of chickens, carabao and goats, all wandering along the side of -- and sometimes through the middle of -- the highway.

-Bus driver honks a lot to scare aforementioned goats and carabao off the road.

-Satellite dishes set up in the tiny, remote villages along the highway.

-Remember: Take Dramamine before the bus leaves on its curvy, mountainous journey.

-It's early Sunday morning, and loads of people are out working in the fields, doing road work, building things, etc.

-I saw the same foreigner twice, both coming and going, in a tiny village, once getting water from the village water supply, and once watching two men climb a power pole. Who is he? Why is he there? Is the Peace Corps in Laos?

-Corn fields planted on impossibly steep slopes. John Deere is not going there!

***

I did have a bit of adventure on this trip. (Our trip to Luang Prabang was problem-free, fortunately.) About two hours outside of Luang Prabang, the bus broke down. It only took 15 minutes to fix, so no big deal. Three hours outside of Vientiane, it broke down again. After 40 minutes, we all unloaded our bags to switch to another bus. But the new bus turned out to be a minibus, which was not going to hold all of us plus all of our luggage. As all the other foreigners
and a few Laos piled on, I looked at what would be a miserable bus ride to Vientiane. A woman sitting next to me, on the grass in the shade of a concrete wall, said something in Lao that sounded remarkably like "that's going to be a miserable bus ride to Vientiane" and gestured that I should sit back down. "I agree," I said in English, and sat back down.

"Adventure" told me to do it, I wrote in my journal. If I were traveling with Shell, I would have been on that cramped minibus, on my way to Vientiane. Instead, I'm sitting in the shade of a brick wall, 120 km north of my destination with 10 others. It could be a good decision, it could be a bad decision. Time will tell. But time is something I have plenty of! A three-year-old girl just took off all her clothes, and her parents poured bottled water on her. Why does this make me think of Kayla??

It turned out to be a good decision. Within 30 more minutes, the bus was running again, and we were off, in comfort, to Vientiane. Still arrived almost 90 minutes late, but probably only 30 minutes behind that cramped minibus.

I went back to the first restaurant Shelly and I had eaten at in Vientiane for another dose of larb, that spicy Lao salad which I had found pleasantly spicy and Shelly had found obnoxiously so. I believe now that I found it pleasantly spicy because Shell and I were sharing the larb and a number of other dishes. After eating the larb by itself, without sharing it with anyone, it was a bit painful even for me.