Welcome to Laos. Please Wipe your Feet.

Remember how I went on and on recently about a bus ride from Hell in Vietnam? It was bumpy and muddy and seemed to last forever — I swore it was the worst ride ever. Well, I’m here to tell you that I have been enlightened. If you want to experience a seriously crazy, muddy bus ride, you’ll have to visit Laos.

Once again, my lack of planning and research threatened to put me in a bind. I’d bought a bootleg Lonely Planet Laos guidebook two days before in Sapa and finally got around to thumbing through it in Diem Bien Phu. The book said that the border crossing would only accept US dollars or Lao kip and that there was nowhere to change money near the border. I, of course, had hardly any dollars on me, having spent them all in Cambodia while waiting for a new bank card.

After some frantic searching in Diem Bien Phu, I found a gold-dealer who dabbled in currency exchange and he had a single $100 US bill that he sold me at a decent exchange rate. I suspected I wouldn’t be able to change money or find an ATM until I reached Luang Prabang in Laos, and hoped it would last.

It rained hard the evening before I left, with over a foot of water standing in the streets of Diem Bien Phu — I feared this didn’t bode well for the unpaved roads of Laos. I’d heard stories. Ugly stories.

I tried spending the last of my Vietnamese dong, but ended up with a 100,000 note in my pocket (about $5 US) that I couldn’t get rid of. Climbing onto the bus for Muang Khua at 5:30 the next morning, I carried money that I couldn’t use and not enough of the kind I could use, and felt like an amateur.

There were a dozen Westerners on the bus and about as many locals — we were all packed in tight. The aisle was crammed full of backpacks and bundles of vegetables and blankets — Jackie Chan would have a hard time reaching the back seats. The winding, narrow road was paved and we made good time, as we covered the 15km or so to the border.

After stopping to get stamped out of Vietnam, we proceeded on for a few miles without incident. Then, the asphalt disappeared and we hit a large patch of thick, yellow mud. As the bus pitched and bounced, the Australian, Carl, laughed “I think we’re in Laos,” and he was right. Five minutes later, the border outpost rolled into view and we all scrambled out of the bus to get our visas.

It turned out that they did accept Vietnamese dong, as well as dollars or kip — had I known, I would have brought enough dong to cover the fees and saved the dollars for later. I’ll know next time.

The visa was $35, plus a bewildering number of fees. As I stepped up to the office, a man held a digital thermometer to my forehead to insure I wasn’t carrying the H1N1 virus. That only cost $.25. There was an “overtime fee” of $1 for service on Saturdays and Sundays. This was Friday, but they charged us anyways. Another “fee service” of a dollar covered… something.

The fees only added up to a few bucks and I didn’t really care. I just kept handing them money until they stamped my passport. To prove it was all legit, they issued a separate receipt for each fee, easily doubling the amount of time we had to stand around waiting. After about an hour, I had my passport, my visa, and four receipts — I was good to go.

Others weren’t so lucky. A group of four Danes had assumed that they could pay with credit card, or draw money from an ATM and had just enough cash between them to get in the country. I quickly felt a lot better about my poor planning. The French couple, Pierre and Carolle, had enough for visas but when they went to pay their fees, the officer in charge wouldn’t accept their last $5 bill — it had a tiny crease in it.

After a lot of debate back and forth, the officer wouldn’t give in, so I gave them my 100,000 dong note, getting three dollar’s worth of kip back as change. They were extremely grateful and promised to repay me. I pointed out that I’d started with $5 that I couldn’t spend and ended up with $3 that I could use — I was money ahead. Serendipity is a lovely thing.

This was a true frontier experience — the building had neither power, nor water. When asked about a toilet, they pointed to the bushes across the road. Two Frenchmen had spent the night here and were anxious to join our bus back into Laos. They’d been told that they could enter Vietnam without a visa and had been stranded when they learned it wasn’t true. Buses only pass through here once per day, so they’d both slept on the floor of a nearby restaurant, waiting to return to Laos.

After nearly three hours, we were all legally in the country and tumbled back into the bus. From here, we only had about 80 kilometers to travel to reach Muang Khua. How bad could it be?

Five minutes later, we found out. The driver tried to speed through a deep puddle on the left side of the road and with a loud bang and a shudder, the bus came to a dead stop. Squeals and shouts of alarm echoed about, as the left wheel sunk to the axle and the bus tilted alarmingly. Trying to power his way out of the situation, the driver floored it — successfully burying the rear wheel.

We were only two kilometers into the country and we were stuck. Welcome to Laos.

They chased us all out and the driver tried to rock the bus out of the mud, but it looked hopeless. It was stuck in a tight turn and going forward would only take it into deeper mud. He had to back up, but the main drive wheel was bottomed out, spinning uselessly.

The driver’s assistant tied a small nylon rope to the back bumper and motioned for everyone to line up. I was convinced this was a futile gesture and took my time getting there, finding –too my delight– that the rope was full by the time I arrived. I had a great view of the action, as everyone pulled and the wheels spun madly, but nothing moved.

He then tied the rope to the front and this time I was standing in the wrong place, so I clambered down the embankment for my turn. Dammit. The mud was deeper here, and thick. We pulled hard and the rope stretched, while the driver gunned the engine. We may as well have been trying to pull down the Great Wall of China — the damned thing didn’t budge an inch. It was all we could do to climb up from the road with our shoes attached — this stuff was like concrete.

Now, here’s a bit of advice — a traveling tip, if you will. If you’re going to sink your bus to the axles in the middle of nowhere, try to do it within 100 feet of a Caterpillar excavator. It really makes things easier.

While were were scrambling about in the muck, trying to pull the bus free, someone had been making phone calls and knocking on doors, looking for the owner of the nearby Caterpillar. After an hour or so, he appeared and plucked us out in a matter of minutes. After ‘washing’ our shoes in equally-muddy water, we climbed in and continued on our way.

The road continued in this condition for pretty much the rest of the trip. It was narrow and muddy, with steep drops to the valley below — sometimes a shear drop of 500 feet or more. I couldn’t see the bottom. Everyone on the right side of the bus would moan as we came around a turn and the rear tire passed within a couple of feet of the edge.

The driver was having to gun it to get through the mud and the rear end would often break loose and drift to the side, spraying mud behind us. The Brit, Darryl, was afraid of heights and was losing his mind. He was one breath away from hyperventilating. Eventually, he put in his earbuds, closed his eyes, and thought happy thoughts.

Over the next several hours, we nearly got stuck again at least five times. We crossed three creeks, one of which required the driver to open the engine compartment and install a handmade PVC ‘snorkel’ to the carburetor so it wouldn’t fill with water. Even still, we nearly stalled in the middle of the fast-moving water. This was real adventure travel. And they didn’t even charge us extra.

Eventually, the road ended at the Ou river, where small boats and a ferry carried people across to the small town on the other side. We had reached Muang Khua, after being on the bus for ten hours.

I paid 25 cents for a boat ride to the other side and marched up to the Nam Ou Guesthouse above the river, the first hotel in sight. It had a restaurant and a deck with great views. A woman showed me a small, dark room and said “50,000 kip” ($6 US). I looked inside, saw a fan, a bed, and a bathroom and said, “I’ll take it”.

Johnny Vagabond drives a hard bargain.

Tagged as: bus, hassles, laos, mud