Travelling from Vietnam to Laos

Beautiful scenery along the way.

A couple of cute Laos kids at a village along the way.

We started our journey into Laos at 5:30 am in Dien Bien Phu. The trip into the first decent sized town in Laos was only 110 km from our starting point. Doing the math in our heads we figured the latest we'd roll into town would be about 10 am. Boy, were we wrong!

As I mentioned, the bus we were taking was scheduled to leave at 5:30 am. We were quite pleased when we pulled out of the bus station at 5:40. However, only 15 minutes down the road we pulled into the driveway of a house and everyone other than the foreigners on the bus all got off and sat at the end of the driveway. We still aren't sure what the delay was, but 1 1/2 hours later everyone piled back on to the bus and we were on our way.

I should probably point out that our bus was a 24 seater. At one point Brian decided to count how many people were aboard....the final count was 56.

We finally arrived at the border where it took another 2 hours for everyone on the bus to be checked through. By the time we left the border it was 10:00 ( our estimated time of arrival in Laos...and we still had 75 km to go). The bus driver informed us that we probably wouldn't get there until 2:00 pm.

At the border.

Brian and I were lucky to have seats at the front of the bus, with lots of leg room....or so we thought. It didn't take long for our leg room to be filled up with people, their bags, their shoes and their food. There was one lady in particular who seemed to think that Brian's legs were her own personal backrest. At one point she didn't feel comfortable enough so she reached back and readjusted them.

These are the people sitting (and sleeping) in front of us. The people lying down just shoved everyone out of the way so they could have their naps!

It didn't take us long to realize why it was going to take 4 hours to cover our last 75 km inside Laos. The bus wound through the mountains along dirt roads, forging through streams and mud pits that broke up the clay. It was a beautiful drive.

The bus, crossing one of the many streams on the way. I'm not sure what they do during the wet season!



Getting on a "ferry" to cross the river.

We arrived at our destination in Muang Khua shortly after 2:00. We thought it was probably to late to catch a boat down the river to where we hoped to stay the night, but, to our surprise we were still able to hire a boat. We got on and travelled down the river with 5 other travellers. It was a beautiful trip, and we had some other adventures on the boat. We met a couple of stupid guys who had shipwrecked their boat and were stranded on the shore of the river. For the sake of time, I'll leave the rest of that story until we come home.