That’s what the sign should have
said on the front of our bus. Instead it said รถกลางคืน,
which I can only assume means night/death bus.
Thanks to a travel agent I have
since grown to dislike very much, Zac and I bought bus tickets from Chiang Mai,
Thailand to Luang Prabong, Laos. We initially tried to get there by boat but
the lovely lady assured us this was impossible. Turns out, when she said
impossible she meant easily the best way to get there. Put it down to the
language barrier?
So instead of two days of
cruising down the Mekong River (with two guest house stays included) we endured
five hours on a minibus, followed by 13 hours in a freezing cold, erratically
driven minibus averaging 30 km’s an hour (at best) through some of the windiest
roads I’ve ever seen.
It was bad. And even slightly too
many sleeping pills didn’t really help. At one stage we crossed to the other
side of the road, to pass another bus. Our driver soon realised the truck
hurtling in the opposite direction took quite a dim view of this sort of road
arrogance. Brakes were slammed, heads were bruised and the stuff still sitting
on Zac’s seat went flying down a stairwell. I’m fairly confident this would’ve
been Zac’s fate too if he hadn’t moved. Also, a bit of the ceiling fell off at
one stage.
Unfortunately in my sleep and
comfort deprived state, I didn’t take a single photo of the death machine. So
you’ll just have to use those imaginations.
We arrived in Luang Prabuang
about 6 AM and were greeted by an extremely entrepreneurial guest house owner
who knew we’d do anything for a bed.
Oh and I certainly recognize the
irony in calling for a more adventurous, less comfortable destination and a
couple of days later experiencing this. After a few hours sleep the journey
doesn’t really seem so bad, and the destination is looking pretty amazing. More
on that later.
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