You just gotta laugh . . .

because sometimes there is nothing else!!!

This is the saying i have adopted in life and it has been very necessary in the last 5 weeks but on Monday 11th October I even had to convince myself that this was the case. . .

So lets rewind a few days back to Thursday 7th October, were in Hanoi and decide that we will leave the day after the 1000 year celebrations and we book bus tickets to our next destination, Laos. We go to a booking office recommeneded by the Lonely Planet called Sinh Cafe, after deciding that at 90pounds flights are too expensive we decide to take a bus, not just any bus a sitting bus (heaven only knows why we made this choice, we somehow convinced ourselves we would be fine!) We purchase our $15 tickets for the 21 hour bus journey and off we go to enjoy the rest of our time in Hanoi . . .  fast forward back to Monday 11th October . . .

4.45pm, we arrive at the booking agents, as told to, we then get put in a cab and arrive back to a hostel, 2 mins from the hostel we were staying in, so firstly, why did we have to walk all the way to the booking office? Finally after a 45 minute wait we are packed on to a minibus with several other people all heading to Vientaine in Laos, too. After 30 minutes driving we arrive at a kind of bus depot and the group are split, some going on to luxury sleeping buses and the rest (8 of us to be precise) are slumming it on the sitting bus. The sleeping bus turns up and on get the first group. Then the guy who collected us tells us to folllow him, so we drag ourselves and our bags for about 10 minutes and then we wait . . . but the place we are waiting is some dodgy street that looks like it is home to Vietnam's most unfinest prostitutes and drug lords, great or what!? After a further 30/40 minutes, and a hundred buses driving past us, our bus, a rickety old one, finally shows up (its been waiting in the bus depot behind us the whole time!!!)

Me and new friends before the back seat got invaded!

So we chuck our bags in the under carriage and board the bus to find, not only an almost packed bus full of Vietnamese people but also the aisles full of bags of rice, fake Lacoste T-shirts and other random stuff. We see seats at the back and head that way, but the gap between the back seats and the ones in front of them have also been packed full of stuff so I take a seat at the back with the two Dutch guys we have met and I have to sit with my knees up to my chin, just wonderful! As there are 5 seats and only the 3 of us at the back we have a little bit of room to spread out, for now!

'opps up side . . '

And so our journey begins, we have not been drving for 20 minutes and the aircon breaks (this continues to go on and off the entire journey and because I am at the back next to one of only four windows on the bus I have to open and shut when needed!!) once they get it back on, we are off again and then another 15 minutes on we stop again, this time to upload even MORE cargo, we look out the window and see all of our bags in a pile on the road side, so off we get to make sure they get put back on before we depart. These kind of shinanigans carry on for the next hour or so and then finally I manage to nod off to sleep. After about 30 minutes I am woken by somebody shoving me in the side. As I get my eyes in to focus I realise that more Vietnamese people are getting on the bus. Two cram themselves on the back seat with me and the dutch guys and the rest all sit on the cargo in the middle of the aisle (the only way I can explain it, is that they look like they are waiting for the song  'oops upside your head . . ' to start playing and then they will do the hand actions to the dance!!!) Then I notice at the front some people can not sit and they just stay standing, for the entire journey. This was complete and utter madness and due to my tiredness I did not know how to feel, but finally I nodded back off to sleep. I woke a few hours later to the Vietnamese lady next to me with her head on my shoulder fast asleep and no air con again! This carried on until about 8am, Bloody marvellous!!!

At 8am we arrived at the Laos border. Firstly we had to go through immigration on the Vietnamese side and once we got through the bus drove off without us. I was soo unimpressed and anyone we tried to ask just started waving their hands as they did not understand, apparently!! Finally one guy who spoke english asked us if we were ok, after explaining he pointed us in the right direction to the Laos entry border and said our bus should be waiting on the other side, which it was. THANK GOD!!! The rest of the journey continued pretty much the same as before, the lady next to me kept feeding me (as if I really need it!) with crispy bacon and some random fruit that on the outside was a cross between an onion and and an apple and inside was like a white pomegranate, but it tasted good.

Squished

Finally at 6.30pm on Tuesday 12th October we arrived at our destination, Vientaine the capital of Laos, much to our suprise! We got straight in a tuktuk and headed to the hostel recommended to us by the girls we met in Cambodia (thankyou ladies it was very nice and real Tesco tea bags with breakfast was a bonus!!)

I appreciate that in this post you guys reading this can not quite grasp the reality of what we went through in that 24 hours or so but it was gruelling and mentally straining. After much deliberation, as I had plenty of time to think about it stuck on that ,I decided that it was most definatley a, 'you gotta laugh' moment and this is why . . . .

Comapred to all the stories we have read about or been toldof on our travels, about the particular crossing we did, we were lucky that we were only deprived of leg room and space, oh and the occassional spout of no air con, because we have heard far worse stories like; bus drivers demanding extra money half way through the journey and if people have no money or refuse to pay then they get thrown off and have to hitchhick the rest of their way, girls getting touched up by pervy men, buses stopping 10km away from the final destination and having to walk the rest, buses being robbed by bandits, buses stopping for 5/6 hours to let the driver sleep (we had a crew of  4 so they took turns) or buses not stopping at all, not even for toilet breaks, the list goes on . . .

So I think, weighing up all of the past experiences with ours, we did not get such a bad deal, it was not great but atleast we and all of our belongings got there in one piece and we can now definatley laugh about it and swear we will never make a crazy decision like that EVER AGAIN!

All of you due to travel be warned!!!