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.