I'm Hardcore!

My departure from Phonsavanh would mark the beginning of one of the longest, most challenging adventures of my entire life. I planned to travel from here to Hanoi, Vietnam by public transit - overland. I knew that it was going to be difficult, at times, but I had no idea what a feat it would prove to be. Just look at a map and you'll see how remote this part of the globe is. And oh boy, what a crazy journey it turned out to be...

Luckily my journey began with good company. Staying at the same guesthouse as I was were two really nice girls from Germany who were planning on taking the same trip, so we decided to join forces together and head on out. We left Phonsavanh at around 8am and began the long bus ride to Sam Neua. The public bus was actually not nearly as horrendous as I had expected it to be. There weren't many passengers at all so we each had our own seat, and I, surprisingly, had enough leg room that I could sit up straight (a rarity here in Asia!)

The bus ride turned out to be over 10 hours long, but was through some of the most spectacular scenery I've ever laid eyes upon. The 'highway' (it's barely paved, and wide enough only for one vehicle) snakes its way through the remote mountains of northeastern Laos, up and over absolutely gigantic hills, clinging desperately to sheer hillsides, and connecting the very few tiny villages of people that live in this empty quarter of the globe.

Our journey would have been a bit shorter but we were delayed by a landslide that had swept across the road. It's been really rainy lately in this part of Laos and so mudslides are a common blockade in these parts. Unlike some of the smaller landslides that we had seen earlier, this one was quite large and very thick and muddy, with a bus-sized boulder lying right in the middle of the road. To get around it we had to drive through the mud, and ended up getting our back wheels stuck in the sludge. It took nearly an hour of digging and pushing (by the driver and his buddies) to free the bus, and then we were on our way again.

Clara, Maddie, and I arrived in Sam Neua sometime between 6 and 7pm, and were absolutely STARVED as all we had eaten that day were a small baguette, and a couple tiny apples and bananas. We had a fried rice dinner at some local hole-in-the-wall just as the torrential rains arrived again, and called it an early night at our guesthouse.

We woke up the next day at around 6am and headed back to the bus station to catch our bus to the Laos-Vietnam border. Our 'bus' turned out to be a pick-up truck with two rows of bench seats in the back. We climbed in, or more like *squeezed* in, with the other passengers, which included some scary-looking men who wouldn't stop staring at us, a few elderly people who looked to be at least 100 years old, a young woman with a baby, and a basket of ducklings. Yes, that's right, baby ducks. So it was 'cheep-cheep' all the way on our four-hour ride to the border, and I felt bad for the poor things that seemed terrified. At the next town after Sam Neua two other whiteys joined us in our journey - a friendly English couple named Beccy and Macey.

Crossing the border turned out to be a strange but fairly easily procedure. Our truck was not allowed to cross so we got out and went through the paperwork to leave Laos. This involved opening all of our luggage and going through each and every piece of clothing, thoroughly examining all electronic equipment, and even leafing through all the pages of our books. We were then free to cross into 'no-man's land' - that half-kilometre wide strip of land inbetween the two countries. This meant that for about 10 minutes while we were hiking we were neither in Laos... nor in Vietnam. So where were we???

Immigration at the Vietnam side involved more paperwork and another dissection of our personal belongings all over again. We were all a little nervous at this point cause we had no idea what to expect. This is a very new border crossing, one that just opened last year, (it wasn't even in my Lonely Planet!) and we weren't sure what infrastructure existed to carry us on our next leg of the trip. However, we were happy to hear from the border guard that there was a bus just up the hill that could take us to Thanh Hoa, a major city on the coast, where we could transfer to Hanoi. Also according to the guard, the bus ride to TH was only about 5 hours long, and the leg to Hanoi only 3 hours, so we could be in the capital in about 8 hours altogether. Woohoo! We're almost back in civilization, kids!

Oh, what foolish children we were...

We found the bus to Thanh Hoa, and was told that it would be departing 'around noon'. We couldn't get on the bus just yet cause they had to load it with some local goods that were being sent to TH, and we naively thought that it would only be a few minutes to load up the shit and then we'd be on our way. Turns out we had to sit for two hours in Bordertown/McShitville waiting for our small bus to be loaded...with sack after sack after sack of rice! Each bag of rice weighed 80 kg. and I'd say they loaded at the very least 50 of those giant bags. They filled the roof, the ailes of the bus waist-deep, and even stuffed sacks under every single bench on the bus. After that they loaded up sacks of vegetables, boxes of unknown things, and a basket with a rooster in it. Cause I mean, come on, what bus journey would be complete without some live poultry?

The heat that afternoon was almost unbearable, and there was nowhere for us to get any real food or any place to use the bathroom. During our wait at least half of the town came by to gawk at us, and I especially felt bad for Maddie as she was covered from head to toe in a horrible rash because of an allergic reaction to something that she had eaten the day before. Random strangers would come up and poke at her skin and make strange faces of disgust at her discolourations, and I could see she was getting really uncomfortable with all the un-wanted attention. During our wait we also saw howling dogs getting picked up by their necks and being put onto...scales... Our worst assumptions were that these screaming dogs would later be used for...food...and our fears were confirmed when minutes later we saw a hanging dog carcass across the street, neck slit, covered in blood, half-decomposed, and open from head to tail with about half of its guts missing.

Finally it was time to board the bus! Man, we were SO READY to leave that god-forsaken border town! We made our way onto the bus, but it took almost another hour to load all the passengers. On a bus that seats about 30-40 people or so, I'd say that they loaded up a good 100-120 passengers. This meant that there were people sitting in seats, on the sacks of rice in the aisles, on top of other people, and on the backs of seats... This also meant that everyone had pretty much no personal space whatsoever, as no matter which way you turned, you had someone's butt or feet in your face. Oh, it's gonna be a long ride...

And that it certainly was!

Our 'five-hour' ride ended up taking 10 hours, and once again involved trudging along a mud-plagued highway through the middle of nowhere mountains (but again, breathtaking scenery all around you.) And this journey, naturally, would not be without its own forms of peril. While driving across a semi-flooded bridge (more like a dam actually, but it had water flowing over the top of it a little) one of the tires blew or something, and the driver had to get out and spend an hour or so getting that fixed. And then later on we came across another massive landslide that we had to drive OVER. The bus crawled up and over the mud and rocks and was tilted on its side, I swear, like almost 45 degrees or something, leaning over the lip of the canyon. I looked out the window and saw a raging river far down below in the valley and it was then that I could already imagine the headlines: "Five unidentified foreigners found after over-crowded bus plunges into ravine in Vietnam!"

We made it through safe and sound, and finally arrived in Thanh Hoa at around midnight. Before arriving here, though, we stopped at a small town about half an hour from TH where 95% of the passengers got off the bus. I have no idea why everyone was getting off in the middle of nowhere, but it involved spending a good half hour unloading each and every sack of rice, and then another half hour of the locals arguing over which rice sack belonged to whom....oh boy.... We were so tired and hungry and cranky, and the five of us just wanted to yell out the window "Just shut the fuck up and take any goddamned bag of rice!!! They're all the bloody same anyway!!!"

Our slow bus to TH, after this stop, transformed into a rocket and we flew to the city. I guess our driver wanted to make up for lost time, and so he drove at least 120 km/hr on the highway, and he spent about 70% of that time driving on the....left-hand side of the highway. On-coming traffic would be blaring their horns at us and our driver would just accelerate more and lay on his own horn, and always at the last millisecond the other car would veer off just in the nick of time. (And yes, they're actually supposed to drive on the RIGHT here in Vietnam!)

There were two other guys on the bus from Laos and, using sign-language, we communicated to them that we needed a place to stay for the night. (No way we're getting a bus to Hanoi tonight!) They took us to a guesthouse across from the bus station, and it was the most disgusting motel I've ever had the misfortune to lie eyes upon. It reeked of old urine, the beds had no mattresses but instead had metal bars and some straw-filled blankets, and the bathrooms were BLACK and probably hadn't been cleaned in a good decade or two. If ever there was a Roach Motel, this was it. SO NOT the kind of place we wanted to stay at after our long journey!

Macey and I decided to search around the empty neighbourhood to find a better place, but we only found one other guesthouse that was not much better than the first one. This part of town was really dark and felt quite dangerous, and we were all anxious to get out of there. The original guesthouse owners were also very suspicious of us, and followed us along making us feel even more nervous. We found a taxi and pointed out a guesthouse in the Lonely Planet that seemed nice that we wanted to go to, and he said he knew where it was. THANK GOD! Let's get outta here! We couldn't all fit in one taxi so Beccy, Maddie, and I went in one while Macey and Clara in the other. The guesthouse owners, at this point, were on their motorbikes and started to follow the cabs as we left! We were totally freaked out, fearing that they were going to try and rob us or something, or were pissed off that we didn't want to stay at their place and wanted to beat us up!

About 5 minutes into the ride I noticed that the city streets and buildings were behind us...and we were now driving outside the city in the country. Uhhh....where the hell are they taking us???!!! Now we were totally freaking! I saw a sign that said 16 km. to Sam Son, which is a beach town outside of Thanh Hoa. The hotel that we had agreed to go to was back in TH, so we couldn't figure out why they were taking us outside of the city.... This cannot be good!

We arrived in Sam Son a few minutes later, without harm or foul, thankfully, and told the cabbie to just stop at the first big hotel we saw. A new challenge now presented itself. Both the girls, and Beccy and Macey hadn't planned for arrival into Vietnam very well, as none of them had any local currency on them, and the girls had only a few US dollars. Beccy and Macey had no cash at all, and so how the hell were we going to stay at a hotel when the banks aren't open to cash anyone's traveller's cheques til Monday!? (and this was Saturday night!) Oh man, the troubles just keep on coming, don't they?

Luckily, being the suave traveller that I am, I had bought some Vietnamese dong before leaving Ventiane, and had some US dollars as well. It wasn't much, but it would be enough to get us through....maybe... We paid far too much money to our bastard taxi drivers, and then woke up the receptionist of the hotel and begged her to open some rooms for us. She agreed to let us stay (although we were still not sure how we'd pay for the rooms as there wasn't enough cash for all of them), and we grabbed a bite to eat at the cafe around the corner. Once again we were famished as all we had eaten that entire day were 3 baguettes and some crackers.

We went to sleep and then got up the next day determined that there must be a way out of our financial situation. We all had the money, just not in cash form! We devised a new plan, and the hotel was very accommodating with it as well. I would take the girls into Hanoi that Sunday afternoon (to get a place to stay, and more importantly to get Maddie to a hospital as her rash was starting to worsen and turn blue,) and the hotel would let Macey and Beccy stay an extra day 'on their tab' until the banks opened on Monday. Thank God, it seems like things will work out after all...

Clara, Maddie, and I took a minibus into Hanoi, and, of course, still had one last unexpected hurdle to clear. We had yet another encounter with a greedy scum-sucking mother-fucker taxi driver, only this time it ended with 20 minutes of yelling and screaming. When we arrived at the bus station in Hanoi we caught a cab and agreed to pay him 100,000 dong for the ride, having no clue as to what was fair. When we arrived at our guesthouse he suddenly demanded 150,000 dong!!! Fuck that shit! This was SO the last thing we need to deal with. He started to yell at us and get really angry, but luckily the guesthouse staff came to our aid. Apparently our ride should have cost only 50,000 dong - at the most - and so they joined the yelling at the taxi driver bastard who had clearly ripped us off. Eventually he left, but it sure took a lot of angry yelling to get him to leave us alone and go away. Welcome to Vietnam, eh?

That night, after much-needed showers, we treated ourselves to an expensive dinner at a nearby posh restaurant. Oh sweet baby Jesus, was it ever amazing to eat REAL FOOD after nearly three days of only bread, rice, and water! After our fantastic meal we took Maddie to a hospital (had to go to three before we were directed to the right one) and got everything taken care of with her. The doctor gave her some medication and it was all good.

We settled in for the night, feeling SO HAPPY to be back in the city, and although it was too soon yet to laugh at our adventure of horror, we knew already that we were Survivors, that we were Hard-Core Backpackers, and soon we'd be laughing over our story with others over a drink. Until that time comes, I'll just hide here in my room, and sleep sleep sleep. :-)