Boxes to swirls, China to Laos
Luang Prabang, Laos.
Oh China! We were sad to say goodbye, but were glad we got to know you a (very) little bit. Our last bus ride out of China was pretty uneventful. We spent our last afternoon in China sitting in Prague Cafe in Kunming spending lots of Chinese money (but not very much American money) on the most beautiful food. Really, just look:
I read a National Geographic that was lying around (which was wonderful since I miss them) and Steve read a Foreign Affairs magazine on China. It was a very fitting display of our different personalities! We got to the bus station about an hour or so before our bus was scheduled to leave and we were immediately shuffled onboard. It turned out that all of the under bus storage was mysteriously full (I’ll get to that later) even though the entire bus area was stuffed to the gills with people’s suitcases and boxes! We kept pointing at the bottom of the bus and at our bags but they insisted that we take our bags onboard where we just laid them beside us in the aisle.
Since we were leaving before sunset we both got a bunch of reading in while sometimes glancing up at the Jackie Chan movie playing on the bus. I love Jackie Chan movies on buses. They’re so easy to follow and are pretty entertaining to watch, so you don’t even need to understand the soundtrack (which is hilariously dubbed into Chinese). When it finally got too dark to read we watched another movie which was awesomely bad. It was a really bad American movie set in California where from what we could gather a Catholic priest somehow had the power to summon a snake-like dragon thing with feathers to combat the forces of evil! Some dude the priest knew got ahold of the dragon summoning charm somehow and was attacking the city’s drug runners. A couple of cops (the guy looked really familiar, but I could never place him) were hot on the trail of the missing drug dealers who would usually only leave behind a pile of blood but sometimes clues like an old homeless guy as a witness and once a giant black feather! Ooh! Anyway, it was great, and we were having fun commenting from our bus beds, but then we stopped for a pee break and they never turned it back on! One day I will find this movie and finish watching it just for kicks–hopefully still dubbed in Chinese because I’m convinced it makes it better.
There were four other foreigners on board. Two girls from Ireland who we could barely understand but were really nice and hilarious, a guy from England who really hated China, and an older woman from New Zealand who refused to speak in English, so we sort of avoided her. The three youngish ones were all really nice and we chatted with them on breaks during the overnight trip. The three of them had a harder time then we did on the bus since they didn’t get their own private little bunk bed but were instead thrown on giant communal beds that spanned the back of the bus right over the engine (which was acting up a bit)! Poor things. The two girls were on the bottom communal bunk with two Chinese men who apparently weren’t the cleanest or the friendliest of gentlemen.They had funny tales of flying elbows and fighting over the window! Well, better them than us, I suppose!
At one point on the trip, still on the Chinese side of things, Stephen was my hero. I had had quite a lot of tea and soup and other liquid yummies at the cafe in Kunming and even though I’d diligently gone to the ladies’ room right before getting on the bus it was maybe an hour into the trip when I had to go again. After almost six months of transportation without bathrooms or the ability to say, “hey, I gotta pee, can we stop?” I’ve gotten really good at holding it. But about another hour or so into things it was getting to a danger point. I was staying pretty calm and was just telling myself we would stop soon when we went flying past the first gas station I’d seen since we got on the bus. Bad sign. I knew that a) if the previous part of the journey was any indication there wouldn’t be another gas station for at least another hour, and that b) we weren’t having a pee break any time soon. Having my hopes dashed was the end of things for me. I turned to Steve and told him that I couldn’t hold it anymore. I think the sound of my voice must have immediately convinced him of my situation because he jumped out of his bed and went to the front of the bus and somehow convinced our two non-English speaking drivers that not only did we need a pee break but that it was an emergency. I have no idea how he managed this. Later he told me that he just wouldn’t leave and kept talking at them in English. But it worked and they pulled over to the side of the highway where I peed beside the bus without any sense of embarrassment.
Our first views of Laos came in the morning after an uneventful border crossing. It was all foggy and jungley and really looked like a completely different world from China. We both giggled and that felt guilty at the on-site visa for Laos having the United States and Canada listing under the heading “United States Zone.” Poor Canadians. It’s not our fault, I promise. Armed guards searched through bags (without us around) on both sides of the border. And on the Laos side they opened up those mysterious compartments under the bus and they were full of boxes with tiny plants in them! We were detained for quite a while and ended up having breakfast at a little stand just over the border. Eventually I saw the inspection guy (who was very delicately holding one of the little plants the whole time he was walking around and who apparently kept it) take some cash and some papers from the bus drivers and we were on our way. Whether it was a bribe or a fee I’ll never know, but it was all a bit shady either way.
We arrived in Odomxai, around 2 in the afternoon both very hungry and happy to be off of the bus. We didn’t have a map for the town and had no idea how big it was, so we just sort of wandered around trying to find a guest house that was listed on our travel fish print out that sounded nice. We ended up getting orientated pretty quickly with the help of the tourist office’s map and the fact that it was basically a one street town. We also gave up on the guest house we were looking for since it wasn’t on the map and there were tons of other guest houses around. We went into a very pretty looking one that we figured would be too expensive but at least it’d give us an idea of what to expect. And it turned out to be about $5 and absolutely lovely with a giant bed that was so soft and comfortable, a big bathroom with a hot water shower, a tv with HBO and other stations in English and beautiful solid wood furniture! I liked Laos right away!
We both got showered and ate some snacks and watched HBO for a bit until it seemed like an okay hour to grab some dinner. We got delicious soups with noodles and vegetables and really good tomato for about a dollar each and were ridiculously happy and satisfied. We walked around town a bit, up a hill to the wat where we saw our first saphron-robed monks.
It was a wonderful first impression. Odomxai was in no way a beautiful town, but it was charming in a lot of ways and mostly just because it was so different from China. Coming from China straight to Laos was like sinking into a hot steamy bath after a day of hard labor. It was just so easy, relaxing, quiet and empty. Odomxai is the capital of the province with its same name and is the ‘travel hub’ of Northern Laos. But it was basically two streets with no stop lights or stop signs and very few people. The houses were a mix of wooden structures and beautifully designed concrete buildings with all wooden details. You could immediately see the French influence on this old French colony. The streets were paved but were so covered in an orange dust that you couldn’t tell except for their smoothness. And best of all there wasn’t a skyscraper anywhere in sight. We found an ATM (even though there wasn’t supposed to be one) and we took out 1,400,000 kip! The exchange rate here is currently around 8,500 kip to one $1 which is so much fun! It’s sort of a pain to be walking around with a giant wad of bills, but since the biggest bill they have is 50,000 it’s sort of inevitable. Everything is hilariously in the thousands, with our $1 soup being 10,000 kip and $6 room being 60,000! I’m such a currency nerd, but I love it.
Tags: Laos
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