Category: travel
The overnight bus was an experience. We’re still too used to being in Australia, and are alarmed when they haul a moped onto the roof of the bus by hand, and tie it on (along with the rest of our luggage). I gain an appreciation of Thai and Laos karaoke, and am enthralled by Thai kung fu movies with tuk-tuk chases. The 5am arrival in Luang Prabang lets us watch the sunrise … if we could be bothered… Most of the first day is spent asleep, and then watching locals play bocce by the side of the road. This is followed up by a careful surveillance of the night market
Bikes are hired the next day, and we ride around town on our sweet Chinese style single-speeds. I am shocked and apalled when I realise our 1000kip/10min internet (US$0.10/10min) is faster than my internet connection at home.
As we cross the Friendship Bridge, we switch from the left side of the road to the right (damned French), and the well-paved highway turns into potholed ragged asphalt, which turns into dirt road, which turns into a new road… and we’re in Vientiane. Fed up with the place quite quickly, we jump on the bus to Luang Prabang that night.
Swamp, rampant undergrowth, enormous billboard structures, washing hung on every balcony and window of multi-story apartment blocks, and a cat on a smorgasboard of tin rooves. We’d arrived in Bangkok. Then, horror of horrors, we went to Khao San road, where we see an alarmingly enormous bogan woman (with her miniature mother in tow), wearing cork heeled sandles and a hideous elasticated strapless “dress” and straggly bleached hair. As we eat breakfast, we watch overexciteable English blokes standing up and yelling at each other, before returning to conversations with the Thai bar girls who are hanging off them – starting early, or still up?
We do some touristy things to waste the time away before our overnight bus to Vientiane… Giant Buddha, markets… find a street that sells only speakers and amps… find some American tourists trying to find out how much it would cost for them to take the cute puppy on the plane home with them… then our tuk-tuk driver Schumacher takes us to the station, and we get onto our super VIP awesommo double-decker bus, and barrel our way northwards to Laos.
So, plans changed, but finally we should be on an aeroplane tomorrow night, for two weeks of gadding about in South-East Asia. Instead of the old plan, there’ll be just the bit circled in orange below… in other words, lazing around in Laos for two weeks. Well, probably not too much lazing. But not sticking any feet through over the border with China though.
