A Border Crossing

In the first week of November, I made the decision to leave Vietnam after 5 beautiful weeks. It was my intent to make my way into Laos by a fairly unconventional route. To cross the specific border I hoped to, I first needed to obtain a physical visa from the Laos Embassy in Hanoi. This consisted of getting a specific 3x5cm portrait taken and filling out the application in person at the Embassy. I also had to leave my passport with them, which they said I could pick up with my visa the following morning. When I arrived the following morning at the visa office (which to my knowledge only deals with this specific situation many, many times per day), it went as follows:

"Passport please," said the man at the gate.

"Uhh, no I am sorry, you have my passport. That's why I am here actually," I replied with a chuckle.

"No english sir. Passport please."

"No, I don't...you have...my (pantomiming) passport...inside (pointing to building)."

"Passport for entry please."

This went on for a while. I was pulling out my phone to access my translator app when I encountered another problem. I was in Vietnam, but this man was outside the Laos embassy. What language did he speak? What was the least offensive assumption for me to make? I was not going to guess based on his appearance, sadly my 5 weeks here did not grant me that ability to distinguish.

Luckily this was avoided as while I was fumbling around with my phone, he finally conceded and let me enter the building. Once inside, the process took about 10 seconds for the worker to recognize me and hand me my passport with the correct visa stamped on a full page, which seems a bit greedy for a country with only 8 million people, but I digress.

I resisted the urge to make a show of displaying my passport to the guard as I exited, deciding to be the bigger man, literally and figuratively.

Armed with the correct visa stamp in my passport, I could enact the next step of my plan. After several days of exploring the countryside in SaPa, near the northern border of Vietnam, I booked a night bus that would take me to Dien Bien Phu, which I just realized is part of the string of nonsensical phrases that Billy Joel recites in We Didn't Start the Fire. I had taken countless busses in Vietnam at this point, and you never knew exactly what to expect. They ranged from normal city busses, to quite luxurious sleeper busses with your own cabin and bed that was almost large enough to straighten my legs. This one however, was by far the most...interesting? Unique? Imaginative? Horrible? Take your pick. The bus did feature some horizontal seats on each side of the aisle, where locals were already packed in with supplies and personal items. I found an open one of these about 2/3 of the way back, and was mid contortion to twist myself into place when the driver pulled me back and shook his head. He instead pointed me towards the very back of the bus, where there was a built up ledge with one king sized mattress. It became evident at this point that this was the seat for the white people who decided to buy this ticket, which included myself and 5 others who were to share these cushy confines. I will admit, this was possibly the most legroom that I have had on any form of transport in Asia, but that is where the pros ended and the cons began. For the next 8 hours my semblance was closer to Dracula in his coffin aboard the Demetor than an American aboard a bus in Vietnam.

I awkwardly tried to make smalltalk with some of my bedmates, a couple from France. I asked where they were headed to. They said they were headed to Muang Khua in Laos, which was my intended destination as well.

"So you have a ticket to Dien Bien and then you are going to buy another one at the bus station there in the morning?" I asked expectantly.

"Oh no, we just bought a ticket that goes all the way to Muang Khua."

I had no clue this was even an option, as everything I had read online suggested buying a new ticket once reaching Dien Bien in the morning.

"Oh well," I said, "I will just get another ticket when they drop us off at the bus station and continue on with you guys then."

The bus did not drop us off at the bus station in Dien Bien Phu.

After intentionally booking this bus because it was notoriously late, it arrived an hour early at 4:15am and parked at a random gas station outside of the city center. People were starting to exit the bus, so I pulled up my handy translator app and asked the bus driver if he was taking us back to the bus station where my ticket said I would arrive. He was a man of few words in Vietnamese and a man of zero words in English and instead responded by motioning me out of the bus and pointing at the ground.

After standing around and looking collectively confused with the Frenchies, another man approached us.

"Lao?" he said.

"Yes" the French couple responded in unison.

"Yes" I echoed.

He was a bit confused by this as I am assuming he was told to pick up two people instead of three.

"Ticket?" he asked in my direction.

"Yes" I said as confidently as I could.

A quick nod told me that this was all the confirmation that he required, and I was in.

After standing at the bus station for another hour in the dark, a smaller bus pulled up and we were told to get inside. We drove for less than 5 minutes before our driver pulled over to the side of the road. Without saying anything to us, he got out of the bus and proceeded to eat a bowl of soup from a small restaurant (and by that I mean someone's home that also happened to sell soup). I was a little annoyed at this point that I had now watched two meals be consumed without having the opportunity to have any myself, but was also a bit scared to metaphorically rock the bus that I was aboard with no ticket.

After finishing his soup, and in a strange twist of fates, we reversed direction and drove to where else but…the bus station. I was starting to think that this was possibly the plan all along and they were just not able to articulate it, meaning that I could/should now just buy a ticket at the station. This turned out to be incorrect assumption #400 of the day, as the ticket office and inside of the station were completely closed. Instead, we got out of the bus and were directed to sit on the curb as they loaded the bus with various goods for the next hour. After this wait, we were instructed to once again board the bus. Surely this would be the time we start our journey to the Laos border!

10 minutes later, parked back at the bus station where we had arrived 3 hours ago, I could not help but laugh. By this time, another bus had arrived, and the ample space that I was claiming on our smaller bus evaporated before my eyes as 12-15 more people crammed in with their luggage. We set off down the road, but never made it more than 1 mile without stopping to load more goods into the bus. Just when I thought there was no physical way to add anything else, we would pull over and add a couple more crates of live chickens to the roof, or another hundred loose dragonfruit under our feet. With my knees now fully tucked up into my chest, man and bird alike finally made a break for the border.

Upon arrival at the border crossing station, we were immediately greeted by a very large and very dead cow on the side of the road outside the office. As a proud Wisconsinite, I took this as a very ominous sign, but there was no turning back now. This journey was a one-way ticket, or I suppose, a lack of one in my case.

The crossing itself was largely uneventful, but did teach me an important lesson that was pervasive throughout my time in Laos. Things move SLOW. There is zero sense of urgency to move things along, almost as if the entire country has organized a worker slow-down as part of a union protest. This of course is just an abstract example, as unions would never be able to actually exist in Communist Laos.

Several hours and many windy roads and switchbacks later, the bus abruptly stopped and announced we had arrived in Mong Khua, my intended destination. With no phone service and no way of truly knowing where we were, exiting the bus was another leap of faith. I collected my bags and made for the riverbank, where I hoped to find information about the slow boat that could take me down the Mekong to where I really wanted to reach, Nong Khiaw. A local informed me that tickets were not sold in advance, but told me to return the following morning around 9am to get on the boat.

At 8:30 the following morning, I stood on the dock and purchased my ticket. The boat only goes all the way to Nong Khiaw if it has 5 souls aboard, not including the inevitable poultry. Luckily, I was joined by several other couples from Germany, Poland and France that got us the "good good" and a thumbs-up from the captain.

Besides the 7 of us, the boat was made up of locals who were using the boat to move shorter distances to small villages on the river that did not even show up on Google Maps. As always, we made many stops to drop off everything from bags of rice, animals and an assortment of fake designer clothing: Gucci, Versace, Louis Vuitton etc.

About three hours into the trip, we reached a dam that was recently built by the French, and were required to exit and walk around the dam to another boat that was waiting on the opposite side. This was, of course, the only 20 minutes of the entire day that poured rain, drenching us all for the remaining three hours.

The trip down the river felt a bit like moving through time, as each village we passed appeared a bit more built up and touristy than the last. As we finally approached Nong Khiaw and the 21st century, the weight of the previous 36 hours started to set in. After 5 weeks in Vietnam, where travel and tourism has been largely streamlined, this was going to be a whole new beast.

A journey like this called for a BeerLao, or several. Welcome to life in Laos.