Journey from hell: Luang Prabang to Bangkok in 50 hours Part I

Repairing the bus (again)

The other day I was thinking that I haven't filed anything under "travel adventures" on this blog in a long time. Nothing exciting has been happening. In fact, I suspected that my family didn't quite believe my previous travel adventure stories about the chickens on local transport, old ladies who wanted to vomit on me, guides being arrested, flat tires and roadblocks. But we made up for all the missing action with my family on our expedition from Luang Prabang to Bangkok. They not only believe my stories now, they also have plenty of their own stories to tell.

I planned it so that we would make the trip in about 36 hours. First, we would take the night bus (the sitting bus, not the sleeping bus which I hated because it's good for anything but sleeping) from Luang Prabang to Vientiane where we would arrive in the early morning. Then we would have all day to make the two hour trip across the border into the Thai town of Nong Khai, giving us an extra 10 hours to kill. We would then take the very comfortable sleeper train to Bangkok, arriving well rested the next morning. We bought the sleeper train tickets in advance to make sure we had bed reservations.

With my recent experience traveling through southeast Asia I truly believed that the 10 extra hours should be more than enough to cover all the flat tires, roadblocks and any other delays that would happen on the road. I even researched sights that we might go see during all that extra time.

It turned out that 10 hours wasn't enough for bus delays on Lao roads. So here is the story of our 50 hour exodus.

Starting in Luang Prabang, the bus left the bus station only 15 minutes late which in these parts of the world counts as exceptionally on time. For the first three hours, the drive was uneventful.

Then we had our first breakdown. I awoke from sleep, acknowledging that it's probably a flat tire. It should take about an hour to fix. After two hours the bus crew was still working on repairs and all the passengers were asked to get out of the bus.

Bus crew working on repairs

It wasn't a flat tire. The front of the bus sagged almost to the ground. It seemed like the hydraulic system was broken. The bus crew were working on the repairs with hand tools and I watched them, wondering how would they ever repair a hydraulic system on a monster bus at the side of the road with a couple of wrenches?

It was dark and it was cold so a bunch of people found firewood and built a fire where we kept warm. The repair work went on for hours. We asked about a replacement bus, but in the middle of the night, in Laos, there's no such thing as a replacement bus.

Keeping warm by the fire

So we waited. At about 5:00 AM, after six hours of repairs, the bus was finally ready to go. We rode on – for a few hundred meters. Apparently the bus wasn't repaired well enough and more work was required. A few girls were nervous because they had a flight out of Vientiane that afternoon. I also started to watch the clock since we had train tickets that evening. Out of the 10 hours of extra time that we had planned into our schedule, most of them were already gone! We were beginning to be tight on time.

The girls who had flights decided to hitchhike and they managed to stop a truck who gave them a ride. Another group then successfully hitched a ride from another truck. Our family decided to give hitchhiking a go as well but in the next hour there were no more trucks coming our way and we were out of luck. During that time, the bus was again repaired and we continued our ride.

Hitchhiking

In about two hours we reached a larger town. The people who hitched the second ride were there, waiting for us. Apparently the truck who gave them a ride brought them to that town where they were left to wait for a bus. And the next bus that came along was ours! How depressing, they were back where they started from.

The bus kept going but since it was now daytime, it stopped frequently to pick up local people or let people off. These stops took precious time, because all maneuvers were accompanied by moving luggage, boxes, sacks and bags, whatever it was the local people were transporting. Our reserve time of 10 hours dwindled down to zero and I was now really becoming worried whether we would catch our evening train.

Just before noon, the bus broke down again. We had been traveling all night and half the day without food and the place where we stopped had no restaurants and a meager shop with not much useful stuff in terms of food. Some of the local passengers on the bus procured a pot of sticky rice from a local woman. We dipped balls of the rice into a couple cans of sardines. It wasn't much, but a few bites of food was better than nothing.

Eating sticky rice while waiting for another repair

We realized by then that it was time to say good bye to our overnight sleeper train and start making alternate plans. I was so sorry to have to let go of the idea of sleeping on a clean, comfortable sleeper train but there was nothing we could do.

Eventually the bus was repaired and we moved on, finally stopping for lunch at a rest stop at about 2:00 PM. We were finally able to eat, use the toilet and stretch out. When it was time to leave, the bus had to be repaired again. Time was passing and by now we started worrying whether we would make it across the border into Thailand at all since the border crossing closes at 10:00 PM. But we were still hopeful, planning to spend the night near the train station in Nong Khai and catching the first morning train.

Once again, the bus was repaired and we moved on. Once again, the bus stopped for local people getting on and off. But what really pissed us off was that the bus stopped at a stall where a bunch of women were selling dead furry animals by the side of the road. One of the crew members went out to inspect the animals and haggle over the price, wasting even more time. I couldn't see what the animals were because the window on the bus was so dirty. They might have been rats or weasels or something like that.

Selling dead furry animals by the side of the road

By the way, the windows of the bus wouldn't open because the bus was supposed to be air conditioned. Did I mention the air conditioning wasn't working? But on a bus whose hydraulic system is broken you don't really care too much about air conditioning.

Another breakdown later, we had had enough. All the passengers now hitchhiked and we managed to get rides into Vang Vieng in small groups. Two Spanish girls were picked up by a truck full of lettuce and another group were lucky to get on a local bus that came by. The rest of us all piled on a pickup truck that was willing to take us as far as Vang Vieng.

On the pickup truck

One of the passengers knew someone in Vang Vieng who owned a songthaew and he called ahead so that when we arrived, our onwards transport to Vientiane was already waiting for us.

Although the ride went smoothly, the songthaew is not the fastest vehicle in the world and we nervously watched the minutes pass by quickly while the kilometer countdown to Vientiane didn't progress as quickly as we would have liked. Would we make it in time to cross the border by 10:00 PM?

We made it to the bus station in Vientiane at 8:45 PM. It took time to find a tuk-tuk driver who would take us to the border, negotiate the price and wait for two other passengers to be dropped off. We arrived at the border crossing at 9:45 PM, with 15 minutes to go before closing time. We had high hopes of making it across.

But when we showed up with our passports to be stamped out of Laos, they wanted to know where our transport was. We didn't have any, explaining that we would walk across to the Thai side. They said no way, it's not allowed to walk. The minibus that shuttles pedestrians across the bridge during the day was finished. Without transport, we couldn't go.

One of the border officials took pity on us and went out of his way to try to hitch a ride from any vehicle that would still cross the border at that hour. He even went to check the Casino in the duty free zone if there was anyone who would give us a ride but unfortunately, no ride was available and sadly, oh so sadly, we were stranded in front of the border. We had been so close.

To be continued...