I Survived the Bus Ride from Hanoi to Vientiane and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt

Sadly, the most eventful thing Emily and I did in Laos was the bus ride there and it wasn't the good, fun kind of eventful. Though, I will concede it was adventurous.

("Adventure" is my word of choice these days. I'm trying to live up to it but my innate introverted tendencies sometimes keep me from succeeding in this endeavor. I'm okay with that, however, as I'm also working on giving myself the benefit of the doubt and I'm having a blast, so I can't be doing too horribly.)

Anyway, as for the trip from Hanoi to Vientiane, it actually didn't start on a bus. Oh no, it started in a travel agency as many travel stories do--(just ask my grandma how she ended up in Vietnam for three weeks this past winter.) We'd booked bus tickets through a company we'd used and trusted throughout our Vietnam journey. All the stories about getting from Vietnam to Laos are plagued with horror, people vomiting and run-times exceeding 40 hours, and we wanted to make sure the long ride was done in a comfortable bus even if the roads were treacherous, twisting through narrow, rocky mountain roads. What we got was a hot walk trailing behind a guy on a motorbike from one travel agency to another. And then another shortly after that. To say we were skeptical would be a lie. We were downright suspicious. It didn't help that MotoGuy was a real jerk, demanding we follow him while zooming down the back alleys of the Old Town and giving us no explanation whatsoever.

We picked up a few stragglers along the way and were eventually left with a group of travelers heading to Laos outside of a hostel. After another wait, we were crammed into a shuttle van, all of our bags tipping the front of the bus as we made stops to pick up more backpackers where they then had to stand in the aisle and doorway. The lot of us nervously cracked jokes about riding in the packed van all the way to Laos, laughing about having our own horror stories to add to the travel forums.

At 6 o'clock, the given time of departure on our receipt, we were shuffled off the bus at a Ford dealership in the middle of nowhere, no buses in sight, only a group of security guards sitting on stools, drinking and watching us like we were deposited there for their entertainment. Jerky MotoGuy proceeded to split the travelers into three groups, handing off money and two of the groups to other men. Emily and I, five other women and one guy were left there to rot as The Jerk (new epithet that would be a lot more colorful if this wasn't the World Wide Web) sped away to who-knows-where, claiming a bus would be coming for us in a half hour.

An hour passed. Witnesses to money exchanging hands, Emily and I made jokes in poor taste about getting shanghaied in Hanoi, being sold into slavery never to be heard from again. There might have been half-serious cracks about texting our housemate to notify the police if she didn't hear from us within the next 48 hours. The Jerk did eventually come back only to herd us back into the van, dump us on the side of the highway five minutes later and leave again.

Seven women with all their possessions on their backs stranded on the side of the highway at night in a foreign country. (Somewhere in that hour we lost the man who'd been with us. I did see him in Vientiane two days later though, riding a bicycle and looking merry, so he probably wasn't sold into slavery. I'm guessing.) We might've started to freak out. We definitely got angry. I called the travel agency we'd booked our tickets with and was told to wait while they contacted The Jerk. Then I was told to wait again as The Jerk had said the bus was coming and would pick us up there.

We were there for more than an hour. A small contingent of Vietnamese men had convened together behind us. They attempted to talk to us but mostly talked to each other very obviously about us. Two separate women stopped to ask us what we were doing there and then declared, confused and concerned, that the bus station was in the direction we'd just come from and we shouldn't be huddled on the shoulder of the road there.

I like to believe that I'm a calm traveler. In all other areas of my life I carry around too much worry and stress, but I've long held the belief that it's useless to worry when you're traveling. All it does is hinder your ability to think calmly and clearly, which is necessary for getting yourself in and out of situations. This mess, I must confess, had me panicking. It didn't help that when The Jerk came back (and oh my God so much relief that he hadn't actually abandoned us there!) he spent his time standing 50 feet away from us and making angry phone calls. Emily suspected that he'd royally screwed up his job and hadn't got us on the bus we were supposed to be on, so he was worried, trying to figure out how to get us on a different bus and save his job. When a bus finally showed up three hours after we were supposed to have been on one and crammed so full of guys from Laos and their piles of stuff, I had to agree with her assessment.

The bus driver and usher madly rearranged all the luggage, crates of yogurt and milk, giant stuffed animals, musical instruments, laptop cases and mattresses in order to clear seven seats for us on the sleeper bus. Emily and I found ourselves squeezed into the very back of the bus on the lower level. We had to scramble over the junk piles in the aisle, some so high they trapped whoever was on the lower level into their seats, and then crawl through a gap at the end of it to get to our seats. Every time we got on and off the bus we had to take off our shoes, so we were further hampered by our shoes clutched in our hands. Three guys twice my size were on one side of me, Emily on the other, and I couldn't sit up without hitting my head. I spent the next 20 hours suffocating in the heat and the sweat of myself and two other people. The guy next to me was too large for the narrow length of his seat so he always had an arm and a leg in mine, sometimes resting atop me. There was no bathroom on the bus and we made infrequent stops. I thought I was being slow-roasted in an oven on wheels--no need to turn me over as the constant dips and bumps in the road rattled me around enough to make sure I was evenly cooked.

The guys on the bus, who, I decided after a brief talk with the man next to me, were all students in Vietnam, were very good friends with each other, had made this trip a million times together, and were all very nice. None of them spoke very good English and our usher didn't speak any as far as I could tell. The seven of us (we'd decided to band together in our plight in order to survive in tact), who were the only women on the bus, were left to fend for ourselves every time we stopped. Nobody ever told us where we were along the journey. When we got to the border we all thought it was a rest stop until one of us got off and told the others where we were.

I can't even begin to describe how miserable this trip was. Good humor is a traveler's best asset/weapon. This trip sucked all mine out through a straw along with my soul. When we finally made it to Vientiane, we all stumbled off the bus stinking of sweat, cranky and disoriented only to see that we were not actually in Vientiane or even anything resembling a bus station. One of the nice, young men from the bus called us a tuk tuk (a cart pulled behind a motorbike) to take us to the center of the city. For anyone who has ever traveled in Southeast Asia you already know that you can't really book hotels and hostels in advance if you're traveling on a budget, except for in Thailand, I believe, so none of us had a place to stay. We decided to stick together, pick a place to stay in Lonely Planet that had an address in the city center and go there. After the longest bus ride of my life (and I'm pretty sure that I've spent half my life on a bus between school, soccer and travel) as well as the absolute worst, we made it into Vientiane and found a place to stay without any of us dying and/or suffering too much trauma.

A shower and some food later, I felt a lot better. And now, of course, I've decided that The Bus Ride from Hell makes an excellent story. All good travelogues include bad happenings along with the good. If they didn't, they wouldn't be very interesting.

As for the rest of our stay in Laos, there's not much to say. If we had known more about the country or what there was to do/see there, we'd probably have made better decisions. I'd originally wanted to go to Luang Prabang which is North of Vientiane and looks closer to Hanoi on a map, but the trip supposedly forces you to either go through perilous mountains or sidetrack to Vientiane and go from there. Strapped for time with Emily's flight home already booked for August 2, we decided heading North wouldn't be a wise move. Vientiane turned out to be a calm, relaxing city. There wasn't too much to do but we hit up some temples, including the one made famous as the symbol of Laos, and the night market along the Mekong River.

We ended up rooming with one of the other women from the bus ride and she was headed to the 4,000 Islands in the south. The travel guide had nothing but good things to say and I'd heard it was beautiful there, so we hitched along for the ride. Turns out the 4,000 Islands are beautiful, covered in square rice paddies, tall, thin trees and the kind of lush green that can only be found in places that are perpetually wet (hello Western Washington), but there's also nothing to do there.

The 4,000 Islands are possibly the most peaceful place I've ever been and I'd recommend them to those seeking peace and quiet on their travels, but two days was enough for me. I didn't think I was so attached to the trappings of modern life, but I have to confess to going a little stir-crazy. I'm a bit ashamed of this, but I am what I am. We spent two days lazing about in a bungalow along a river on one of the islands, reading and bemoaning the fact that we like modernity too much. I'm all for the romanticism and tranquility of a place without the distractions of the Internet and TV, but the utter lack of anything worth doing--no museums, no activities, no sights to see--doesn't exactly make for a fun-filled couple of days. Also, I've discovered, I like those distractions a little too much to find their lack novel or romantic. Sad, but true. I'm a big fan of indoor plumbing as well, so to be without it in a place that's always hot and sticky isn't ideal. We did manage to stumble across one of the advertised waterfalls, but that's about it.

After we realized just how far south we were (right on the border of Cambodia), we decided we might as well head into Cambodia instead of wasting time backtracking. I'm sad about this as I don't think what we did in Laos counts as really visiting or seeing the country. If we'd had more time, I'm sure we could have discovered something amazing about the place. Oh well. Now, almost a year later, I find myself back in Cambodia and I still love it here. It might be my favorite country in Southeast Asia. I haven't been to Thailand yet, but I'm fairly sure it won't compete with the easy, happy feeling Cambodia gives me.

To read more about our Laos trip and/or see two pretty pictures head over to Emily's blog.

Natural Wonders: Castles of Sea and Sky

Our last week in Vietnam before getting shanghaied into Laos (details to come in the next post), Emily and I made it all the way up to Hanoi, where we declared it more European than Saigon in an atmospheric, sprawling kind of way, but still just a big, ugly, grungy city. The sleeper bus took roughly 15 hours, so we crashed in Hanoi, but the next day we were off again. Our next destination was Ha Long Bay, the place I'd been most looking forward to visiting in Vietnam.

You know all those beautiful pictures of junks with wings for sails protected by enormous, majestic rocks in a bay of cool, emerald water that always seem to represent the natural beauty of Vietnam on guidebooks and travel sites? Here's one to refresh your memory or in case you have no clue what I'm talking about:

This photo is not mine. I took it from talk.onevietnam.org.

That's Ha Long Bay, and it is just as breathtaking in person as it is in professional photos.

We booked a two day, one night trip that included touring the bay and sleeping aboard a junk, kayaking through a cave into an enclosure in the middle of looming cliffs, visiting the "Surprising" cave, climbing one of the rocks for an aerial view of the bay and all of our food for the two days. It was brilliant. Our junk was a hip, wooden vessel, sadly without wings, that glided smoothly through the water, which was eerily calm and a murky green. The weather didn't hold for our stay, raining all the way there and sporadically throughout the rest of the trip, but the hazy mist that hung over the bay made the rocks look like they were rising out of thin air, castles in the sky, floating not on water but on drifting gray clouds. It was spooky and very, very cool.

Unfortunately, the haunted look didn't make for great picture taking but I tried my best. You be the judge.

Eating meals surrounded by views like these was surreal. It's moments like those that remind me I'm living one of my dreams.

I wasn't able to get any good photos, but within this valley of water, in the curves and spaces of the limestone, reside little floating villages that seem to be playing a grand, never-ending game of hide and seek with the junks drifting in and out of the thousands of rocks.

Being engulfed in beauty of this magnitude is more than a little overwhelming. Sometimes I had to hold my breath and let it out slowly to regain my equilibrium.

The whole trip was permeated by a calm that seemed to hang in the air, clinging to my skin. I felt like I'd been transported to the most peaceful place on Earth. Remarkably, this feeling wasn't broken by the abundance of booze cruises full of happy drunks laughing loudly and unselfconsciously as they swam at night, jumping from the roof of their junks.

The cave was made up of three different chambers that started small and increased in size. Lit up from below and above by eerie blue, green, red and yellow lights, neat pictures were easier to come by in the cave.

Our guide, Vu, who spoke excellent English, was fond of starting and ending sentences with, "This one," as well as describing things as "nice" or "very nice." He encouraged us to use our imaginations to see things in the walls of the caves. His enthusiasm for this game reminded me of cloud-gazing when I was a kid and being convinced I could see dinosaurs and pop idols in the sky.

In the third chamber, we discovered why the cave was called "Surprising." As we rounded a corner into the chamber the first thing to greet us was this:

Here's a close up for those of you who couldn't make out what was so surprising from the first picture. Vu tried to tell us that many visitors said this rock looked like a cannon and he pointed to a corresponding hole in the ceiling that's placement seemed to corroborate this claim, but we all knew it to be a load of crap. (If I now receive lots of jokes about how your penis is like a cannon, I will never forgive you.) I mean, come on, they had it lit up from beneath with red light.

 

And, lastly, to continue the hilarity of the "Surprising" cave, I came across this shop window on a street in Hanoi:

It was too awesome not to take a picture of it. Apparently, COCK stands for "Creative Oriental Crafts Kingdom," but I like the juxtaposition of this picture with the rock from the cave. It makes me giggle like a schoolgirl.

Summertime and the livin' is easy

Day 10 

Already Emily and I have hit four different stops along our journey North. Today, we're headed for Hanoi only to, hopefully, mosey along to Ha Long Bay once we get there. We've been at turns active and lazy, alternating our days for optimum adventure and chill time. This operation works well for us and we're having a blast. 

Some of the highlights of the past several days include snorkeling in Nha Trang, strolling along the serene streets of Hoi An, eating cao lau, a traditional soup full of rice noodles, croutons and pork, at a little wooden table lit with a single lantern along the river in Hoi An, and the brief, unexpected stop our bus from Hoi An to Hue made at the Marble Caves just outside of Da Nang.

The snorkeling was good fun. I hadn't been swimming since I first arrived in Southeast Asia and the day was bright and the water was clear. We saw lots of little fish, some showy, some pointy, some hardly noticeable, none of which I know the name of, and were also fed a tasty meal on the ride back to land. The caves were a spot of fortune shining on us. At our first rest stop on our way to Hue there was a dark gap in the cliff face I thought looked interesting. For roughly 75 cents, Emily and I ventured into a cave full of grotesque carvings of people being eaten by frogs and humanoid creatures with the heads of monsters. It was morbid, creepy and very cool. The disembodied hands reaching out of the pool of water at the entrance to the cave should have tipped us off, but, well, without any literature we had no idea what we were going to see. The bats fluttering around the highest reaches of the cave added a nice haunted factor as well. I only wish I knew something about the history and purpose of the caves.

The best part of our trip, however, has been Hoi An. It is a peaceful, idyllic little town in the middle of Vietnam. Hoi An radiates the calm of easy living, so different from the chaos that is Saigon. I loved it there. The Old Town is a UNESCO World Heritage site full of French colonial buildings, which, despite time and wear, are a cheerful yellow and the silk lanterns dangling from every eave, tree limb and lamppost offer warm, colorful spots of light in the breezy evenings. At night, parts of the Old Town are closed to motorbikes, so there's no worries of crossing the street or lingering at shops. It is a town famous for it's tailor shops, lanterns and silks, so the shopping is dangerous. Emily and I each spent a nice chunk of money on pretty things. 

As for Hue, where we are now, there's not much to say. It doesn't help that we've been stuck here a day longer than we wanted to be, but I don't think it would have mattered if our plans had run smoothly or not. Hue is, frankly, boring. Though I must confess that Emily and I haven't given it much of a chance. But, oh well, we're off to prettier, more exciting parts of Vietnam this evening and I'm too happy about life to feel bad about our lame stay in Hue.

P.S.--Here's the link to Emily's blog if anyone is interested in the other side of the same story-- http://neitherthere.wordpress.com/

Everything looks perfect from far away

Day 2 of our epic, whirlwind adventure: rappelling in Da Lat.

Me looking like a pee-wee football player. Huzzah!

After months of teaching and not much else, Emily and I heralded in our tour of Southeast Asia with aplomb. Rising early, we sipped (and griped over) tiny cups of coffee before heading out into the wilderness with a group of boys from Wales, a lone Australian and two Vietnamese guides. The day was bright, sun shining through the tall, spindly trees, warm on our faces while a breeze kept the morning cool. Our intrepid leaders, who spoke very good English and were surprisingly careful and on top of all safety matters, led us down the side of a canyon, where our first stop was a lesson on rappelling. We were first instructed on how to hook ourselves up to the rope and walk down the side of a steep slope. This was followed by a lesson on how to jump when you're rappelling down a cliff. With only six students, both lessons took all of ten minutes--not exactly confidence instilling, but we trekked on.

One of the best things about the trek was the lead into things. We were never thrown into something we couldn't handle. Instead, we worked our way from simple, easy lessons into more difficult drops, step by step. After our brief introduction to scaling down cliff faces while dangling on ropes, we rappelled down a short cliff. The next cliff was taller and ended in a splash of water. This was a tease, a getting our feet wet, if you'll allow me the pun, of what was to come.

Getting the hang of it. (I'm sorry about the puns. I just can't seem to help myself.)

Going into this adventure, I didn't really know what to expect. Two friends had raved about it and it sounded thrilling like a good jolt of some much-needed adrenalin, but I was also apprehensive as I'd never done anything remotely like rappelling. I'd never even done the fake rock-climbing you can do in all the enormous, ultra-modern, hi-tech gyms these days. Having said that, my first tastes had me giddy, shaking with excitement like a toddler who has no words to express how happy they are.

We broke for lunch at our next rappel site. Over sandwiches and fruit, we soaked up the sun and the sounds of water rushing over land.

When I saw the waterfall we'd be going over next I was less terrified than I thought I'd be. I'd somehow been roped (pun intended, once again) into going first in everything and this was no exception. While sailing down the side of the cliff in a mix of smooth and shaky jumps had been fun, it was nowhere near as exhilarating as doing it down a waterfall with the force of the water pushing me down, my feet slipping over slick rocks, and rainbows peeking out of the spray around me. My joy ripped through me, bursting out in uncontrollable laughter. Not even my fumbled landing where I lost the rope and fell into the water instead of jumping like I was supposed to could suppress how elated I felt.

The first waterfall. This was my absolute most favorite part of the day.

Emily concentrating on where her feet are going next.

Next we jumped off a cliff into pool of murky brown water. At only 11 meters high, I was less than impressed with this part of the excursion, but the boys loved it. They jumped and dove over and over again, twisting through the air with glee. Our guides even got in on the action--one dove from the highest part of the cliff and the other did a front flip/twist.

I'm pretty sure I've jumped off higher things than this. Just saying.

The sight of our last rappel was the only one that scared me. I was faced with a jagged cliff edge, empty air space, a gushing waterfall coming from the opposite direction and a narrow, rocky landing. None of the previous rappels had been from a great height and neither was this one, but the roaring white water and impending free hanging above it had me nervous. However, that still moment where I was dangling in the air between the cliff above me and the rocks below me was one of the coolest parts of the whole experience. Somehow, despite no prior experience with rappelling, I felt safe there in that moment and I knew I really was in control of my pace and actions even without a place to put my feet. Of course, then the water hit me and I bounced around a bit before dropping into the water below me, guzzling a gallon of water as I did so. I might need to work on my landings.

This is right before I lost whatever semblance of control I thought I had.

Emily being engulfed in the waterfall.

All in all, it was an amazing way to start off our adventure. I'd do it again in a heartbeat.

What are you going to dream about?

I can feel the world changing all the time. Or, possibly, I'm changing in it. Ten months away from home--the longest I've ever been away--and I don't feel like the same person. I am, really, in all the core, intractable ways that have defined me since I was a small child, but I feel bigger, better possibly, as if I'm becoming more myself.

In the past month, I've quit both my jobs and spent two weeks visiting a friend in South Korea. I cannot begin to say how good I feel about both of these things. Working all day, six days a week was too much. I am completely burned out on teaching and it was a relief to say goodbye to that chapter of my life. With two weeks of June to spare, I made a last minute decision to go to South Korea. My time there was spent relaxing, hanging out with my friend, watching (lots) of movies, touring Busan and Seoul, eating delicious food and recuperating my peace of mind.

On my way to Seoul, in between nodding off and jerking awake, I glimpsed one of the most amazing visions of my life: somewhere thousands of miles above China, I saw the sunrise meet the sunset in the most wondrous and warm band of orange light. I knew then, even in my sleep-hazy state, that life was on the up.

There are many things to say about my trip to South Korea. I was particularly fascinated to discover the differences and similarities between there and Vietnam, and all the peculiarities and nuances that I lived and witnessed while there. However, the most important things are that I have been re-energized and life is really, amazingly, spectacularly good.

Today is the first day of my and my friend's epic whirlwind tour of Southeast Asia. We're currently in Da Lat. I am excessively happy and excited. Tomorrow we're going canyoning. Tonight I'm going to dream of adventure.

As one of my grandmas likes to say: breathe deep.