The bus journey down to Vang Vieng was very interesting. Imagine strapping yourself into a rollercoaster whilst browsing through a large stack of very pretty postcards and you'll have some idea of what it was like. For a change, the bus itself was just fine and the aircon worked a treat. What made it interesting was the fact that the road was a narrow 2 lane affair that wound itself tightly around the sides of mountains and hairpinned itself up and down for most of the trip. It seemed that at any particular moment one side of the bus or the other was staring down a 500 foot sheer drop. This in itself isn't all that interesting, but couple it with the fact that the driver genuinely believed in reincarnation and was prepared to put his money where his mouth was. Either that or he was just very, very drunk. So we have a large packed bus careening up and down narrow mountain roads at breakneck speeds attempting to play chicken with every truck and water buffalo he came across. We spent many hours like this and most of them were through what I can only describe as the most amazing scenery I have ever seen. Enormous limestone pinnacles shooting straight up into the clouds and steep sided valleys coated with dense jungle. Waterfalls and meandering rivers were dotted along the way. Screech around an impossible hairpin turn on 2 wheels and there in front of you is another amazing vista.
At this point a few of our fellow travellers started to feel a bit uncomfortable with the busride. People began to scrabble around for carrier bags or anything else they could vomit into. I don't know whether it was from vertigo or travel sickness, but pretty soon we had crusty backpackers throwing up left, right and centre. Maybe they were just travel sick from being thrown about the bus without being able to see where we were going (most honkers were towards the back). Up near the front however, one person could definitely see where we were going and he wasn't happy. Sat immediately behind the driver was a young American guy who we first bumped into on the boat ride from the Thai border down to Luang Prabang. We didn't really know him as we had spent the 2 day journey trying to avoid the guy as he was carrying a guitar. All travelers you see carrying guitars should be avoided at all costs. They almost always try to get everybody involved in a sing-a-long and they genuinely believe they are uniting all the peoples of the world through their gift of music, which is usually a mediocre rendition of 'American Pie' or something by REM. For the record, there is only one universal language, and that's football. So; guitars bad, ramifications of the amended offside rule good. Just remember that.
Anyway, back to our journey. Our American friend was usually to be found with his feet up in a bar telling some pretty young lady about how this or that was, like, so totally awesome. On this occasion however he was a little less laid back than normal. He could see everything the driver could see and he didn't like it at all. He finally snapped on some crazily death-defying driving maneuvre and leapt out of his chair shouting something along the lines of 'We'll never make it to the bottom !' He marched past me with a look of such abject terror on his face the like of which I have never seen before. His mouth was agape and his face was so white he made me look Mediterranean by comparison.
So on we went like this. 1. Screech around another hairpin turn at suicidal speeds. 2. 'Huhhhblurghh!' into the carrier bags. 3. 'we're all going to die !' from the chirpy American. 4. Another breathtaking panorama opens up before us. 5. Begin again from 1. As the back end of the bus seemed to lean out over the cliff edge at a nervous angle, I started to hum the theme tune to the 'Italian Job'. I enjoyed every minute of it. Round a corner, get thrown up against the window. Round another corner, get thrown into the aisle. More breakfast gets ejected, more doom and gloom from the back. Fantastic. I felt fine the whole time and I'm proud to say Cara did too. It was the most enjoyable bus journey I've ever been on. After about 4 hours we came out of the mountains and it was all fairly ordinary after that.
The only other things of note that day were that my MP3 player crashed on me, and with no decent computers around to sort it out so no more music. And I broke my sunglasses in the first place we have been to that doesn't have a sunglasses vendor on every street corner. If I look like I'm squinting on all our Laos photos you now know why.
No comments:
Post a Comment