Busses in the Night

It started off with such promise. The merrily blinking lights, the shadow of night, and the memory of Vietnamese buses allowed me to believe this ride from Pakse to Vientiane (both in Laos) would be a comfortable ride.

Eleven hours into a 10 hour drive and the truth had long shown itself.

When the journey started I walked upstairs, barefoot as all buses in Southeast Asia seem to demand, cheerfully eyeing the wide fully reclined cubbies. More spacious than Vietnam's, I was as excited as you can get about a 10 hour ride as I approached my seat.

Our bus stopped on the side of the bus

A man sat comfortably in my space. That is when I noticed that every “spacious” seat housed two people which led me to ask the obvious question. The Dutch Duo in the cubby across from mine replied, “of course we share, welcome to Asia.”

My bed mate smiled cordially and offered me potato chips as we settled in.

The cool air that fooled me into the expectation that we had air conditioning, dissipated almost immediately, transitioning from chilled air, which I'd anticipated and prepared for- my fleece already wrapped around my arms- to clammy feverish heat. Suddenly, I was peeling the gray material off of my and praying for a breeze.

Hours into the drive, the bumpy road amplified the discomfort of the mattress, it grew harder and harder. I tried to to be mindful of the space I occupied even as I fidgeting in my utter wakefulness; meanwhile my bed-mate slept blissfully and occasionally batted me in the head or rolled over into my space.

I inhabited a space where darkness was pierced with fleeting bursts of light from headlights as we barreled down a the road headed for Laos’ capital.

Periodically we stopped on a seemingly random stretch of highway, the engine still running. Sometimes it would be a few moments, others times the minutes would stretch and we’d idle indefinitely. Then, without warning we’d amble off into the darkness again. At one such stop, six hours into the journey, my bed-mate quietly gathered his things and exited the bus.

FREEDOM!

With all of the space and no stranger beside me I set out to conquer sleep. All around me people were dreaming, escaping the bumpy road that would occasionally thrust me into the air or wrench me sideways toward the aisle and out of my seat.

Flexible as I am, I could not find comfort. Not flailed out int the middle of the bed face up, not face down. Not on my side, not at an angle. It was a veritable “Green Eggs and Ham story without the happy ending.

At some point exhaustion took me. It was one of those sleeps where consciousness just ends. Like walking off a cliff.

The first time I woke up it was more of a stirring, my eyes opened just enough to see the sky had transformed into a pale purple. Something was happening and in the distance I could hear muffled sounds...but sleep beckoned and I followed. The next time I awoke the sun was hanging low in the sky and casting orange light against the mountain in the distance. That sound I'd hear earlier calcified in my head, the sound of tools clanking. It was a familiar sound, the sound of a problem. The drivers were beating on some part of the bus I never saw.

At some point they called a replacement bus, and as it arrived we all scurried t collect our bags and secured a new seat. This bus was older, grosser, smaller. But in its favor, cold air blew through the vents.

At 7 am I wondered how long we still had, how far we were from a meal and a proper bed. Maps.me revealed we were more than 3 hours out. Four hours past our expected arrival.

This is not new. A week ago as I crossed over the border from Cambodia to Laos (the borer crossing where the bus operator scammed us all out of $15 and forced us to walk the kilometer from Cambodia through no-(wo)man’s land into Laos) I carried with me the fresh memory of the bus blowing a tire that was impressive in that it had not popped hundreds of miles back- so bald and frayed it was.

We four passengers climbed off, following the driver, and the men formed some kind of unspoken team (there wasn't a shared language between the three of them) and began unscrewing and pulling on the tire. They pulled and pushed and tugged for at least half an hour, maybe more. And when they finally made peace with the truth that it wasn’t coming off, they pushed the tire back into place- hole and all-screwed the lug-nuts back into place and we all scrambled back onto the bus and drove on as if nothing had happened.

Buses and roads in disrepair are often a companion of travel on a budget, providing a novel though not essential ingredient for interesting stories about the places I've been and the things I’ve seen.

A 10 hour drive turned 15, where I traded in one rock hard mattress for another, is not a particularly exciting story to tell, but I tell it anyway because not all travel is sexy but that’s ok.

David

I wasn’t homesick, or even lonely, not really. But I was something. Solo travel for all of its benefits, has its own challenges. Loneliness or whatever I was feeling, is one of them.

David shares this philosophy

It isn’t that I hadn’t talked to anyone, I have a penchant for talking to strangers even when I'm in the US and have easy access to friends. But meaningful conversation is different from the small talk strangers often exchange when they travel.

“How long are you traveling?”

“Where have you been?”

“Do you have a favorite thing you’ve done?”

Even when they manage to move beyond those basics, like when a Dutch duo shared an alternative boat route from Luang Prabang to Chaing Rai, or the Irish couple that shared tales of travel wonder and woe, the time is often short, the circumstances tenuous.

Pakse, for all that it lacked, provided me with something I needed more than the giant Buddha or the probably trickling waterfall on offer (it is the dry season...and dry season is not hyperbole).

I met David the first day I arrived. He greeted me heartily, told me about the happy hour upstairs, and left a friendly open-ended invitation that I had every intention of accepting. But travel days are scattered, meal times are disrupted, and in this case, the thing I was craving the most – connection – manifested itself in the form of calls from home.

But calls are just calls. Lovely but fleeting. A few minutes after I hang up, I’m left in the quiet of my room. It is the reason I am so obnoxious about friends being on the phone when we are hanging out. “I'm a real person in real time,” I always say.

David was a real person in real time.

Two days into my stay and David and I overlapped at breakfast. Chatty as I am he struck up a conversation and I invited him to join me. Six hours later he had errands to run so we arranged to meet up later.

Conversations with veritable strangers can be challenging. Out of any p;articular context of a job or an event, there is nothing to suggest shared interests or philosophies. And while searching out people that are the same as you can be limiting and problematic, I the current state of political affairs, discussions with strangers who are decidedly different in their social or political views have their own challenges.

the Buddha we didn't see

That didn’t prove to a problem for us. If nothing else we had travel in common, so we started there. Started with where we've been and where we are going. We moved to how long we've been traveling to what brought us here. And by the time we hit that note, we were all over the place. Even politics.

The politics of America, our president, the likelihood that he’ll get re-elected. The politics of England, the likelihood of a chaotic Brexit, Cameron’s place in the blame.

We laughed about the prices and wondered how the city justified tour prices that exceeded those for Angkor Watt. We found a trendy night spot filled with places to drink and eat and wondered how we managed to be the only foreigners in the place.

I left Pakse before David. He let me store my bag in his room since the hotel demanded more money to extend my checkout by 6 hours then I had paid to stay there. He wandered the city with and when my bus was late, he sat beside me and kept me company.

On a trip that is at once amazingly fulfilling and at times lonely- David was a welcome respite from small talk and books. And even now, both of us far from the place where we met, we are still in touch. His texts from Vietnam swirled in with the ones from America…and I appreciate it. Appreciate the gift of a stranger I now call friend.

Don Det

 

tire with no tread and a huge hole

Confusion from the start. I bought a bus ticket to head to Laos on Wednesday so I could leave Friday.

“7 am, the bus leaves, be here.”

Clear enough instructions so I folded my ticket and thought nothing of it until meandered down the hotel steps at 6:30 am, ready to catch a free tuk tuk ride to the station. But the woman at he desk was not the same person from two days before when we’d concocted the plan for my departure.

As she asked me clarifying questions about my bus trip that I couldn’t now clarify, my heart began to sink, I’d already booked my hotel and was ready to leave Kratie. I handed her my ticket hoping that would clarify things and after she had a quick conversation on the phone she assured me they'd pick me up at around 7:30.

So it began.

Some travel experiences are amazing as soon as they happen. They are cemented in my brain and revisited immediately. Others...others I know they will be a story I tell with a chuckle and a grin but in the moment they are irritating and painful.

The ride to Don Det was the sadly not the former.

The easiness of transportation in Vietnam, at least between major cities, is that it is highly organized, accustomed to tourists, and someone usually speaks at least a few words of English. Please don’t misunderstand me, it is no one’s job to learn the language I speak so that I can get along in THEIR country. Quite the contrary, it is my responsibility as a visitor to adapt. Still, I'd be lying if I pretended Vietnam hadn’t spoiled me.

At any rate, no one spoke English on my minivan, not until we stopped the already packed van with four people squashed into each row of seats only meant to accommodate three (reminiscent of a khumbi, my most common form of transportation in South Africa). She was the fourth on my row and as soon as she saw me she asked me where I was from- in English.

We chatted for a bit and then, just bore she disembarked, my panic rising that I’d somehow missed the border, I asked her if I’d missed my stop. She chatted briefly with the driver, assured me he’d take me where I needed to go, and then she was gone.

trying to change the tire (no success)

He dropped me off at a storefront in what appeared to be a random neighborhood. Two other foreigners, backpacks leaning against the wall, calmed my nerves that I was heading in the wrong direction.

Time passed...hours...and then suddenly, we were hurried into a bus far too large for our small party.

Finally on a bus heading for the border , each of us sprawled across seats in varying poses of attempted comfort. The cinnamon colored dust rose in the air like smoke, settling on the foliage hugging the side of the road as we ambled on.

An hour in, maybe more, I heard a deafening pop and flinched, as I am prone to do since my car accident. We slowed to a stop and the four of us plus driver wandered from the dusty inside of the bus to the dusty outside of the street. We all peered down at the blown tire- well worn to the point of miracle. Miracle that it had managed any part of our trip before the fatal puncture.

The men gathered tools and began to remove the tire-and after 45 minutes they realized it wasn’t coming off-stuck somehow on who knows what. They replaced the lug-nuts and we resumed our sprawling positions on the bus and journey toward the border...with an agonizing lack of speed.

We were dropped off just short of the border, exchanging places with the twenty or thirty travelers following our path in reverse, popped tire and all.

My breathing still labored from the previous day when asthmatic symptoms crept in to my chest, I sat waiting for our what next. Eventually it appeared, a man sitting at a tiny wooden desk with a formidable looking stamp and a pile of official forms for us to fill out.

red bus with a flat tire

This was the con.

It was a new one for me and the well-traveled Irish couple I'd been chatting with.

We filled out our forms and then the price was announced- much more expensive (relatively) to what I'd looked up previously.

Thrity-five dollars was the price online, $45 was quoted to us at the border ($48 for me since I didn’t have a passport sized photo). We checked our phones and pushed back on the amount quoted but ultimately, tired and frustrated, we paid, took back our forms and passports and began the walk to the actual border.

On the way from the scene of the con to the Cambodian customs we discussed how we knew we’d been conned but also how helpless you are in such situations. Making a fuss is seldom helpful. In retrospect we could have walked ourselves to customs on our own, but these were the people responsible for our ongoing travel so...not really. Who wants to be left at the dusty cusp of Cambodia with no way to get to your destination in Laos.

So we ate it. Laughed even. What else can you do?

River Dolphins

I caught a glimpse of the sleek back of a dolphin arching out of the water, a split second of beauty that despite it being my reason for being in Kratie, Cambodia, was still somehow unexpected.

If you listened, ignoring the wedding music blasting from the opposite shore, you can hear the small splash as the dolphins break the water. It is the cross between a tinkle and a shush, and then the shiny back arcs briefly across the water and is gone. Disappeared into the tranquil water, a dream or a whisper. Gone in a breath only to reemerge meters away or not at all, swimming beneath the water beyond my view.

I sat for hours in the small boat, water collecting at the bottom leaving me to wonder if we’d be joining the dolphins in the murky water. But the boat held us afloat, bobbing soundlessly until we watched the water break at a distance and revved the small motor slicing the calm in pursuit of the majesty of an endangered river dolphin.

Forty-five minutes. Forty-five minutes of the music of the river in the waning hours of the day.

And despite the pronounced absence of palate wowing food in Kratie, I watched dolphins and was enchanted.