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?