The Bus Trip from Hell, part 2

We are sitting around waiting for a Typhoon to hit Shanghai after having had a great time in the last couple of days and a lazy Saturday morning in bed reading Huckleberry Finn and the paper and eating Wontons. Lovely. So I think I can again bring myself relive the horror of the Laos Bus Trip!!!!

So where was I?

That's right - blazing through the Laos roads (I refuse to call them highways so as not to offend real highways throughout the world) at warp speed but not actually getting anywhere. On and on we went. Around and around. Up and down and just generally jerking to a fro in a rather unpleasant manner.

Finally at about 11 am the bus driver thought it was time for a piss and simply stopped the bus in the middle of the road on the side of some mountain and the boys got out and went to it. This wasn't too much of an issue for me, what with me being an old hand at pissing in public, but for Shell it was a bit much. We were, as I said, parked in the middle of the road on the side of a mountain and there weren't any of the facilities one would generally associate with a bus toilet stop. There was the road, a mountain, some jungle, a bus and 12 leery Chinese guys trying to get a glimpse of a white woman's arse. All the blokes got to weeing on the mountain side of the bus, so poor Shell was out the cliff side and had to tramp through the jungle to get to a spot out of view of the said 12 leery Chinese.

I finished up and got on the bus, where Shell had returned in a bit of a state. To top off the stresses of having to go to the toilet off a cliff with these guys staring at her, a leech had managed to make it's way onto her shoe. She flicked it off and then couldn't find it until it reappeared on her leg! Again, she flicked it off and I heroically squashed it, but now we had to check her bum for leeches as she was convinced she'd picked up millions of them whilst taking a whizz. We did that and there weren't any but it was overall pretty difficult way to stop to go to the toilet and did nothing for Shell's parlous state of mind at the time.

By and by we got to a town called Odomaxy (or something) and stopped for lunch. The Chinese guys (from herein referred to in the non racist form of the collective noun Chinamen) jumped off the bus and stormed, or perhaps ransacked, their way into another Chinese restaurant where they proceeded to order by barging into the kitchen, shoving each other, pointing at vegetables and shouting orders at the poor waitress. We stood by watching in horror. Finally after the scrum had died down we got to ordering some fried rice and a can of Coke and sat and ate our lunch, again a bit shocked at the way these people behaved.

After about 1/2 an hour it was back on the bus and back to the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, which allowed us some escape from the cold, hard reality if the bus trip. So far we were about 6 hours into our bus trip and had covered maybe 120 km's and still had about 60 k's to the border which shut at 4:30pm. The road seemed to improve but I think it was just the mountains were a bit smaller and easier to navigate and by about 3:30pm we were close enough to the border to get boarded a couple of time by Laos PDR officials seeking some loose change off Chinamen that didn't have their papers in order. The bribing seemed to take a while and there were some heated arguments in a number of languages that seemed to be about the buses insurance. The Laos police didn't seem to worry about us too much but the Chinamen copped it, until finally they dragged a couple of them off the bus and machine gunned them on the ground to the cheers of all the decent people in the world!

No, wait, that didn't actually happen. That was the dream I had, having fallen asleep waiting for these clowns to get us going again. Finally we got to the border where the Chinamen all pushed in front of us at the immigration desk and then got shirty when we were the last ones to have our passports cleared, for apparently we were taking too long. This was a bit much and we called them some names in English that they didn't understand and I wont repeat here, but I think the border guard thought it was pretty funny.

So back on the bus and through the Chinese customs and immigration which was where we met the first nice Chinese person of our trip, in the guise of the guy who checked my bag for contraband and Lonely Planet guides: seriously, they confiscate LP guides as they don't include Taiwan in their map of China. Anyway I'd done a pretty good job of hiding our copy and he didn't find it, but they unwrapped everything in Shell's bag and it took a little while to get it all over with.

By and by we were back on the bus and the change country's was as stark as it was instant. All of a sudden there were 2 lanes either way on the roads and actual cars and trucks and then we drove over a bridge and through a tunnel! Amazing stuff and the next 50 k's took us about 40 minutes as opposed to the 97 hours it would have taken in Laos.

We stopped for dinner at a town called Mengla and had some nice food and a beer and a welcome break from the Chinamen, who we thought probably aren't going to rob and kill us anymore. We had dinner and went back to the bus where some females joined our intrepid crew which had a bit of a civilising effect on the Chinamen. About 8 we were back on the road and it was back to HHGTTG on the iPod. We'd now listened to about 10 hours of radio play and luckily the batteries were holding up well. Zaphod and Ford had just stolen a spaceship from the Restaurant at the End of the Universe when we both sort of fell asleep as the sun set.

The next 11 hours passed with out me really knowing what was going on or having any conscious thought, but my addled mind recalls some weird stuff.

A bus/truck parking area with perhaps 1000 trucks all sitting there idling. We stopped to put more water in the bus. I have no idea why but each time we stopped the driver would get a hose and put lots of water into the bowels of the bus.

Another toilet stop that, again, didn't have any toilets but plenty of trucks and buses to hide amongst while you did the biz. This one was good as when we were walking back to the bus the driver lit the engines and took off with about 15 people not actually on board. Apparent;y he was just moving off the water point 30 metres but it caused a decent amount of excitement in everyone who wasn't on board.

And a market along the side of the road where we stopped for about 20 minutes for no other reason I could see than the driver wanted to smoke a few cigarettes. The market was strange as it was right on the highway, like pretty much in the overtaking lane, sold junk like t-shirts and some food and was fully staffed by people at 3:30 AM.

After that I fell asleep good and proper and didn't stir until Shell woke me up as we pulled into the Kunming bus station. We got the hell off the bus and vowed never to take another overnight bus as long as we lived. In the end, the sum of the parts of this particular bus trip were much greater then the individual events. Taken in isolation there really wasn't much to it, but put together and placed on a bus with the 12 Chinamen it was all a bit much. Put that bus in Laos and China and it was THE BUS TRIP FROM HELL!!!!!!!