Vientiane and the Long Ride

Vientiane, Laos

The ride from Savannakhet to Vientiane took 11 hours of my life that I would really like to get back. It was one of those bus rides that Monika told me about, but that I never thought would be that bad. But wow, it was bad. Gage and I thought we were strong. We thought we were seasoned travelers after almost a year on the road; that nothing could shock us or slow us down. But all it took was one bus ride. One bus ride with seats so small that our knees touched the seat in front of us, with speakers above our heads blaring Thai and Lao pop music loud enough for a night club, and music videos with painfully bad actors who acted out heartbreak as though it were a confusing gas pain repeatedly played on the screen in front of us. For 11 hours. We had planned to spend one night in Vientiane and then head up to the smaller cities and towns in the mountains, each of which would have required a 10+ hour bus ride due to the poor roads. In the ninth hour of our misery I added it all up and realized that we faced at least 57 more hours of bus time over the next 24 days. So when we got to town we booked a hotel for two nights, pulled out our various maps and guides, and reworked our entire plan.

Beached in Nha Trang

Nha Trang, Vietnam

Leaving Dalat wasn’t easy. Not that we wanted to stay in the cold mountains any longer. Actually, we were quite excited about hitting the beach in Nha Trang. No, leaving Dalat just wasn’t easy because of the bus ride down the mountain. A rather high speed bus ride down a very narrow, winding, mountainside street that had both Gage and I in a white-knuckled panic and induced three people to vomit. That kind of not easy. I found myself wondering if the dense green jungle and charming tiered mountain farms were just some sort of landscape-Valium designed to make us more comfortable with the advent of our eventual demise on the highways of Vietnam.