For those of you who think all we're doing here "on vacation" is lying on the beach drinking cocktails, this is how we spent our Monday - trying to get 200 km (or 125 miles) from Luang Nam Tha to Huey Xai and across the border to Thailand:

Promptly at 7 am the loudspeakers directly outside our hotel began broadcasting something that was either the news or government propaganda interspersed with really annoying Laotian (or maybe Chinese) music. Luckily for us, however, we had to get up at 7 so it saved us setting our alarm clock. Pearse jumped out of bed and ran across the street to the bus station to buy tickets on the 9 am bus to Huey Xai. I packed up our bags and 15 minutes later headed over to the station to find him. He was still waiting in line because the ticket window hadn't opened yet, but at least he was second in line. Within minutes, before he even had the tickets, the doors to the bus opened and the best seats were taken. At 7:25, I climbed into the bus to reserve the next best available seats, in the very back of the bus near the window. There I sat for the next 2 hours while the bus filled up with many more people than seats and arguments ensued as to how many people would sit on the back seat (we held firm with 4 westerners and one Laotian, after all it was billed as a 9 hour journey). Around 9:30 am, the bus set off with only 7 people sitting in the aisles or standing.

10 minutes into the journey we realized that one of the windows was missing, a potential problem when you consider that none of the trip would be made on paved roads and copious amounts of dust were stirred up by passing vehicles. Luckily our driver noticed this too and stopped by his house, where his neighbor custom fitted a piece of plyboard to fit the missing window. 10 minutes later, we were on our way again with only a gap of 2 inches instead of 2 feet where the dust could enter. 1 minute later we stopped for gas. 5 minutes later we were headed out of town. The road just outside of town wasn't any better than the road we came into town on 2 days before and the bumps were especially felt by those of us in the back row. At one point, all 4 of us were airborne by at least 10 inches but we managed to avoid landing on each other's laps.

We continued on for about 40 minutes until we started hearing ominous noises coming from underneath us. The driver stopped, looked under the bus, made a few faces, and told us that he needed to go back into town and would return for us in an hour. We looked around at the beautiful but deserted landscape and said "OK." Off the bus went back where it came from and we sat down in the dust by the side of the road to wait for what turned out to be 2 hours. Pearse and 3 other guys headed up the road, figuring that walking was better than sitting in the sun. The bus finally showed up for us (right at about the time I was reaching my breaking point) and we continued up the road, hoping it was the same one Pearse had taken, until we came to a village and saw Pearse flagging us down. It turns out that while we were sweating in the mid-day sun, Pearse and his buddies were drinking cold beer and eating cakes (none of which he bothered to bring back to his wife), yukking it up with the locals.

Reunited, we all continued on our bumpy, crowded journey for a full hour before we broke down again. This time we were only stopped for 20 minutes while the driver and his assistant attended to the radiator. On the road again for a half hour we were certain that this was the end of our bad luck. Surely nothing more could happen, could it? Suddenly the driver stopped again and we got out to ford a river and climb up a hill that was too steep for the bus to make, while once again the driver and his assistant spread out their mats and peered under the bus.

The good thing about all these stops, though, is that it gave the passengers a chance to bond, especially us foreigners. Besides Pearse and me there was a French Canadian guy we had met the evening before, 2 Swiss guys we had taken our previous bus journey with, a Japanese woman, a French filmmaker (who filmed most of our break downs), an Italian couple, a Finnish guy, a French chiropractor working in Bangkok and a British Indian guy. It was at this stop that we decided to start a pool for our arrival time ("arrival" being defined as the bus stopping at the bus stop and opening its doors). Ever the optimist, Pearse had the earliest time of 8:30 pm (keep in mind this trip was billed as a 7-9 hour journey and we began at 9:30 am). The Italian woman was less optimistic with a guess of 1:30 am and we all ferverently hoped she wouldn't win. With a pool of 20,000 kip ($2, or enough for 1.6 liters of beer), we all became intensely interested in the goings on under the bus and the bets kept us in good spirits. Around 3:45 we were on the road again and only had to stop briefly when the assistant ran off the bus, commandeered a passenger and cleared off a few rocks from a recent landslide.

After a short lunch stop we had a good 2 hours of uninterrupted bumping, sweating and tailbone pain but we were all fairly upbeat. That ended halfway down a very steep hill when we heard something snap. Remi, the Canadian, told us the suspension had broken and that we couldn't go on much further like that. At the bottom of the hill the driver and assistant got out, looked under the bus, whistled, made some more faces, and we knew Pearse would not win the bet. We clanked into the second nearest town at dusk. Miraculously, the town had a forge and the driver and assistant were able to repair the broken suspension thingamajig in the dark, without safety equipment, using only our head torches to work by. Even more miraculously, the Italians were able to find espresso. We were amazed at the abilities of the driver and assistant. It seemed they could handle anything that bus could throw at them and boy were they being tested in this journey. As tired as we all were 12 hours after we first sat in that bus, we knew they were even more exhausted.

With 45 minutes left to win Pearse's bet, we took off into the dark on that same horrible dusty road, with a repaired suspension thingy and some tired and increasingly desperate passengers. We started seeing electricity lines within an hour and kept anxiously awaiting our town but first the bus had one last scare to give us when it lost power and there we were with no lights in the middle of nowhere. One last time, however, the assistant fiddled with something and we had power again.

We limped into the bus station at 11:20 pm, making Stefano the winner (he was slightly more optimistic than his wife with a guess of 11:30 pm). In a gallant gesture that we all applauded, he donated his winnings to the driver and assistant in gratitude for their hard work. After an epic 16 hour journey we were in Huey Xai, just a short boat ride away from Thailand, but our day was not yet done. 12 of us still had to find rooms in a town that appeared to be asleep. Compound this problem with the fact that we had no idea where we had been dropped off and no one was around to tell us and some of us began to despair. We turned down the depressing room across from the "bus station" and instead began wandering the streets with our backpacks, which seemed about 20 lbs heavier than they had been that morning. We eventually found a hotel with hot water and at 1 am that morning we scrubbed the many layers of Laotian dust off our bodies and fell asleep exhausted.

A note from Pearse: As Amie mentioned, I headed off walking with 3 other guys after the first major breakdown. We were walking on this road, or rather a dirt track that was being tranformed into a road by hundreds of Chinese workers who were building a link from China to Thailand through northern Laos. We noticed that some of the workers were smoking opium on the biggest bongs I've ever seen. We would point west and ask "Thailand?" and they would look at us and look down at the bong as if they were having a bad trip. A lot of the workers were very friendly and would point us in the right direction with big smiles and looks of bewilderment. It was a great walk but every time we saw a car coming we would have to get away from the road because they would send up huge dust clouds. The road was so dusty that even when we were walking, our feet would sink into the dirt so we had to try to walk on along the edge.

We eventually came to a village, but it had no beer so we continued to the next village which was larger. The first building we came to was a school and when they saw us, school was suddenly in recess and the whole village followed us as we tried to find a restaurant. Eventually, we followed this guy to his house where we got some Chinese beer and snacks and sat around smiling at each other, since that was our only common language. We had left one guy at the side of the road to flag down the bus and I went to relieve him. Just as he got up to grab a beer the bus came by and we were on our way once again.