The Journey from Hell
Trip Start
Sep 05, 2008
1
39
68
Trip End
Ongoing
Hanoi,
Vietnam
Thursday, October 23, 2008
So we get picked up from the hotel at 5pm, and taken in a minibus to the bus station, ready to embark on our massive journey. The bus station turned out to be a small, fairly dodgy looking garage on the outskirts of the city, with a coach parked, almost hidden, in the yard behind it. There were twelve of us Westerners there to travel on the coach; ourselves, a couple of 20-year old lads from Cheltenham, a pair of Irish girls, a 26 year old Aussie name Beau (!), a pair of Aussie men in their sixties, and a couple in their early 30s from the UK. Other than the last couple mentioned, everyone was pretty sound. The last couple though were obnoxious (for the sake of my mother I'll use the word) twonks. They were the kind that can't think something without saying it, had to have the last word on everything, if a gag was cracked he would crack the same gag with a slight twist on it to make it his own. Twonks.
They each had tattoos on their backs that they'd had done in Thailand. "It's really cool" he explained, "you give a monk alms, like 60 baht (£1)and some bread and milk, and they do a tattoo on your back, you don't have any say in where on your back it goes, or what they draw on you. It's like their meditation, like therapy for them."
"Yeah" she piped up, "it's like really liberating just submitting yourself to allow someone to write on your back and not have any say in it." Wow. Sounds to me like it's not that different to waking up having been leathered and got a tattoo done, and not even remembering what you've picked. Except that it's unlikely that the monk would write a rude word.
Don't worry mum, I haven't got leathered and had a tattoo. Yet.
I digress. We're in this weird garage, other than us travelling Westerners there are about 30 Lao people here. They roll a blanket out, sit on the floor eating, then take turns smoking a massive pipe, contents unknown, then they retreat to an air-conditioned room to watch TV.
By six we're bored. "Seven, seven" one of the lads is told when he asks what time we're leaving. By ten past seven we're getting annoyed. "Eight" we're told.
Eight o'clock comes and goes, and we're starting to wonder what's going on. They're not waiting for more tourists, as tickets are only sold for one departure time daily.
Nine comes and goes, and at about ten past nine about eight of the Lao people from the garage jump on board and the bus leaves the garage. A 24-hour trip, we're already four hours behind. Almost immediately we leave the garage the bus is stopped by police. There appears to be a problem with one of the Lao women's paperwork. Ten minutes later we're moving again. When we pass the main bus station ten minutes late, the same police are there, flagging us in. The same woman is led out of the bus and we wait for 30 minutes while the police talk to her. At the end of it she gets back on, and at last we leave.
We're elated to be moving. In the last five hours we've travelled about 5km. But on the plus side the bus is unusually empty (we were expecting it to be packed) and we each have a double seat to ourselves. The bus accelerates, brakes and corners sharply making sleep very difficult, but the extra room helps and we're all reasonably comfortable.
At 2.45am, still in Laos, we reach a pre-border checkpoint. It's closed. The driver rolls out a mat in the aisle of the bus and promptly goes to sleep. We're livid. Will we ever get to Hanoi?
6am: The checkpoint opens. There's one bus in front of us, that had sat there since before we arrived. The army officials give it a proper going over, taking about 15 minutes to search it. We're surprised by this. Obviously though, a coach full of foreigners will sail through. The army guys get on board our bus. "Farang" we hear them say, the Lao word for foreigners. We'll be off in a minute.
They check our bus, close up the doors, then re-check it. The lads on the left side of the bus see the same Lao woman who had problems with her paperwork before trying to shoo the army away from looking in a certain luggage door in the bus. They open it and pullout a large piece of wood which they then photograph. The woman continues to try o block their photographs and push them out of the way. Nice move, love. She is led away up the hill to where the army huts, really nothing more than shacks made of twigs and a plastic tarpaulin, are.
We sit and wait. Something's not right. None of us speak Lao, none of the Lao speak English. It's worrying, but we don't know what's going on. We stand outside the bus. The male twonk starts to take photos of the soldiers and the checkpoint, and is forcefully told to stop. What a dick.
We're there for two hours, until 8am. Then, things suddenly get moving. The soldiers gesture for us to get back on the bus. The lady returns from the huts and gets on the bus. The soldiers follow her out. They were unarmed before; now they each carry a semi-automatic rifle. A worrying development. Four soldiers board the bus, each with a gun. One stands at the back, three at the front. The bus starts to move on, with them on board.
We're still concerned, confused, but attention is all focussed on this one Lao woman and they don't seem interested in us. We're relieved to be moving onwards. Five minutes later, the bus pulls off into a dirt lane, then reverses out facing the opposite direction. We're doubling back on ourselves. We drive for about 35 minutes, before pulling into a police station. Things actually got a bit better here. We were allowed out of the bus, and wandered up the road to find some much needed food and water. Beau found a policeman who spoke English, and explained to him that the Lao people on the bus had been trying to smuggle wood out of the country. Wood! Sure enough, the police removed vast quantities of wood from the luggage compartments and even the overhead compartments of the bus. About half an hour later we were on the road.
By 10 o'clock we had finally arrived at the Lao side of the border. We were held here for some time. Eventually a border official boarded the bus, and apologetically explained that the bus didn't have the correct paperwork, and would not be allowed to enter Vietnam. This trip just gets worse. The options were to go back to Vientiane, where we would arrive roughly 24 hours after leaving, and try to get our money back, or to cross the border on foot and try to work out our own onward journey. The nearest city to the border on the Vietnamese side is Vinh, about 100km away.
As you can imagine, this led to much heated debate. The twonks, worldy-wise as they are, abused the innocent and polite official. Eventually we decided on safety (and haggling ability) in numbers; we would cross the border ourselves and sort things out from there. The official managed to get the Lao woman who was at the centre of all our problems to refund us about US$5 each. The bus tickets had cost US$18 each. We were about 400km into a 950km trip.
We were about to cross the border when an empty bus arrived. We stopped it, and the driver and the woman in the bus agreed to take us to Hanoi. Things were looking up! We climbed on board and discovered, unusually, that the bus was crammed, absolutely chock-a-block with crates of Red Bull. There were crated 2 or 3 deep lining the floor, on almost every seat, everywhere. Weird. We drove about 1km to the Vietnamese side of the border. We were told here that we had to get off this bus and onto another. So we did. Then we had to enter the border station by foot, and bring all our luggage with us to be X-rayed. This took about an hour.
11.00am. Good morning Vietnam! We're in, and only 550km from our destination. In the last eight hours we've progressed about 4km.
Nobody has thought about asking the people operating this bus about costs. In all honestly, we'll be happy to pay what it takes (within reason), we just want to get there. But the others, especially the younger lads, are on a really tight budget. So when the lady running the bus volunteers that she expects $US30 per person there's a lot of unhappiness. After all, the initial tickets only cost US$18 and should have got us all the way there. To go just over half way for US$30 is a bit steep. The twonks get upset again, and start to shout at her. A bunch of Vietnamese men nearby are watching on and start laughing. A few of us explain that raising your voice isn't done in this part of the world, and this is why they're laughing at her. She doesn't get it, and becomes more annoyed, raising her voice at me.
It's stalemate for about half an hour. Eventually two of us approach the woman and explain that we'll pay US$5 each to go to Vinh. They want US$10. We refuse, and eventually they agree. Then we explain we have no money, and will need to use an ATM in Vinh, so can't pay them til we arrive. It's not true, but we're taking no chances. Eventually they agree.
To make a long story marginally less long, we arrive in Vinh and are lucky to stumble upon a minibus to Hanoi. It was packed, 5 people to each 4-seater row, plus our bags at our feet. The driver drove like a maniac, which was just what we needed. No overtaking zone? Blind corner? Not a problem. He must have been on the wrong side of the road, overtaking, for at least half the journey. We missed a few trucks by, I would say, under a foot. We wanted to get there as soon as possible. It suited us.
We arrived at the hotel we'd reserved a room at at 9.45pm, twenty eight hours and forty five minutes after leaving. We'd made good time, considering. They didn't have a room for us. Would they suddenly have a room free if we both start to cry, I wondered, and nearly put this into practice. They had a sister hotel with a room free, and would take us there, for free, on two motorbikes. We each climbed onto the back of a motorbike with a rudimentary helmet on and our massive rucksacks on our backs, and sped through the streets of Hanoi. Cornering wasn't pleasant with all that weight on our backs, and I was a little perturbed after the first corner when my "driver" asked me how much I weigh. But ten minutes later we were in a lovely, clean hotel room, with hot water, A/C, TV and a DVD player. Their only remaining free room (and their best), they gave it to us at the agreed rate as the sister hotel had let us down. We want to stay here forever.
