Vientiane showed very little charm - every tourist/traveller I met there displayed a distinct aura of unimpressed-ness with the place - so I was ready to get out after just one night. Accordingly, I bought a bus ticket yesterday and it departed from Vientiane's southern bus station at 7pm. It had been sold to me as a 'tourist bus'. I suppose it was a 'tourist bus' in the sense that the Round Robin in Pennywell is a 'tourist pub', or in the sense that Baghdad is a 'tourist hotspot'. But it did at least have a crude but effective system of air conditioning. I sat back and read my book and relaxed.
About two and a half hours into the journey, as we were trundling & bouncing through the south-eastern Laotian countryside, my peace & tranquility were rather rudely interrupted by a loud CRACK as half the glass panel by my right elbow shattered into a million pieces, all over my lap and the surrounding floor. About two seconds after that, there was another CRACK, and the rest of the panel went the same way. As I was already aware that the border areas of Laos and Vietnam are in many places under the direction of drug syndicates, and with yesterday's AK47 guy in mind, by the time this second scattering was completed I was already out of my seat and crouching down in the aisle. A Japanese couple opposite me, who were the only other non-locals on the bus as far as I could tell, did likewise, and the poor girl looked quite terrified.
Anyway. The bus stopped, and both the driver and the local passengers seemed much more concerned with putting in place some temporary replacement for the window than they did with any potential hails of bullets from outside the bus. We stopped shortly afterwards, and when I thought it through, I realised that it could hardly have been bullets, because a) nothing inside the bus displayed any signs of having been hit, and b) the glass panel in question was a small sliding panel of only about 10 inches by 4 feet, which had been travelling at 40mph, and I imagine it would have taken an Olympic-standard sniper to hit the same window twice at night. Evidently there had been some kind of structural failing or weakening and the glass had just given way. Fortunately I did old Blighty proud by not squealing or blubbing or anything - although I did indulge in accepting the kind offer of a cigarette from a local. They're 25p a pack here.
As dawn broke we got to the Vietnamese border. A plain-clothes guy came onto the bus and demanded money from me and the Japanese couple for 'stamping passport'. They paid up, but I told him to sling his hook (in polite sign language). In due course I got my passport checked by the actual authorities and there was no need to pay anything, so I was glad I held firm. However, inevitably, the world of scamming did catch up with me eventually. The bus stopped at 11am, in a quiet little settlement on the main road, and the driver said to me and the Japanese couple 'this Hue' and gestured vehemently for us to get off. Again,the Japanese couple complied without questioning, but I could tell that something was up - I knew this was the Hue bus, and that everyone on it was going to Hue, so why was this a stop for foreigners only? Sadly I was alone now, and nobody spoke any English, and - this is the worst part - I looked around at the locals and said 'Hue?', pointing downwards to indicate 'here', and I got a succession of shifty nods and half-hearted smiles. By this time the driver had already grabbed my bag and was marching to the door. Needless to say, when I joined the Japanese couple outside, there were shifty-looking guys with motorbikes telling us 'we take you rest of way to Hue, twenty dollar' (my whole bus ticket had only been $19); and when I took it on myself to walk a few hundred yards back along the road, I found a sign stating 'Hue 17km'. Could have been worse, I suppose. But it was obvious what the deal was: bus driver abandons foreigners to motorbike gang, bus driver gets cut of the 20 dollars each they have no choice but to pay.
I walked back to where we'd been dropped off, and the Japanese couple (all politeness and excessive wealth) paid their 20 dollars each without demur. Well, I thought, f*ck that. I walked off again, and the chief motorbike guy trundled after me on his moped. 'I take you Hue. Twenty dollar. No bus here, no hotel'. He was right - there wasn't even an internet cafe or a shop - and he wore an expression of intense self-satisfaction, in the sure and certain knowledge that he was getting his twenty dollars either way.
Had we been in temperate climes, I would gladly have walked that 17km, backpack and all, just to prove a point. Only four hours' hike at most. But it's 32 degrees C here (I just checked on the BBC website). So I walked away from the motorbike gang, with them laughing at me and following at a distance all the while, and flagged down a random passing moped who agreed to take me into Hue; he didn't speak any English, but he knelt down, picked up a twig, and wrote out the numbers '100,000' in the dust. Trusting that this meant Vietnamese dong and not dollars (there are about 16,500 dong to the dollar) I readily assented, and off we went. And here I am! Fun as it was, I like to think that I will keep the moped-hitching to a minimum in my future travels.
So anyway, I got myself this very nice hotel, and then went out for a bite to eat. I got a club sandwich and a Coke and a water for less than $5. When I got back to the hotel I realised that the cute little Vietnamese servingwench had given me too much change - indeed, I'd come out of there with more money than I'd gone in with. Not wanting to join the ranks of the scamming scumbags, albeit by a sin of omission rather than commission, I was all set to go back to the restaurant and hand back a few notes. However my good intentions were not reciprocated by the club sandwich in question, which suddenly announced itself as having journeyed through my digestive system without condescending to be digested, and after a brief but unpleasant Bathroom Episode I considered all my obligations to that restaurant to be discharged in full.
This is a long one, isn't it? As the bishop said to the actress, etc. Anyway it's now 2.50pm and I'm going to give the midday heat a bit longer to disperse before I step outside again and explore Hue. Who knows where I'll go next? Who knows if I'll be able to get back into Thailand before they have another military coup or two? Who knows if Kevin Keegan is going to officially de-toy his pram once more? Tune in next time to find out!
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| Missing bus window, at the Vietnamese border the next morning |
