The Dukes of Laos
This post was copied over from my old Brownian Travel blog
My head slams into the roof of the tuk-tuk (a motorcycle with the back end sawed off, then welded to a bench on wheels) for the second time in the morning. We're racing down a 1.5 lane highway, full of holes, ditches, and rocks, kicking up a cloud of brown dust. The percussion of the pistons is deafening.
In the back, 12 of us squint as we're slowly being buried in the brown dust. We're packed in with boxes of fruit, our luggage piled absurdly on the roof and secured under a tarp and rope. In between the benches people are sitting on lawn chairs while some people stand on the tiny platform on the back, gripping for life.
Sitting next to me is a 50 year old Californian. He has a few fractured ribs. He was exploring the countryside with a friend on rented motorcycles when he drove into a deep ditch in the road, incorrectly assuming it wasn't full of small jagged boulders. A costly mistake. He swerved and fell hard on his side on one of the rocks. His friend drove off from village to village in search of a way to get them back to Luangnamtha. He showed up an hour later with someone who owned a pickup and eventually made it to the hospital. When he arrived, he was informed there were no doctors at the ER. "It's the weekend!", the nurse explained. He was taking the 2 day tuk-tuk journey to the international airport at the capital city, where he was catching the next flight to Thailand (which has real hospitals).
"I'm just glad my lung isn't punctured!"
Ahead of us, a big truck is belching smoke as it struggles to climb the hill on the dirt highway. It's overloaded with metal pipes which don't seem to be secured in any way. Our driver passes him on a blind turn, accelerates, stands on the brake, takes a hard left, accelerates, decelerates, hard turn, accelerates... every 5 seconds we all slide in another direction. After a while, we stop resisting and fall into a group trance.
It goes on like that for 8 hours...
Travelling between cities in Northern Laos takes half a day partyly because the road winds over endless karst mountains, up, down, left, right.
The other reason is that the driver skids to a stop every other village when someone flags him down to bribes their way aboard.
The transit system is frustrating. Transports are infrequent and schedules change on a whim, so tickets are not sold in advance. In fact, the driver may cancel the trip if not enough people show up. Or, the bus can completely sell out in less than a minute.
I start to feel sick. Oh no. I really don't want to throw up. I try to distract myself from my gut or the little girl scream-crying by concentrating on the PAH!PAH!PAH! of the tortured engine or the RRRRR-RRRR-RRRR of the metallic frame rattling over the rocks. The local ahead of me turns over and starts hurling over the side. Like dominoes, others start puking: locals, the Chinese tourists, and the little girl. The driver chuckles. After a few minutes, the locals start yelling something and the driver pulls over behind another tuk-tuk. Our passengers run to the roadside to puke, and ahead the passengers of the other tuk-tuk are also vomiting.
I have to puke really bad but my chickpea curry with mango lassi breakfast is stubbornly uncooperative. The driver starts honking and we all get back aboard. We pass terraces and the occasional field of rice or banana trees, and then the driver blares the horn as he zooms through tiny villages, scattering children at play and pigs, dogs, and chickens.
I've been to been to forests before, but a jungle feels different. The vegetation is denser and the sounds louder. At parts, the jungle completely reclaimed the road, leaving nothing but dirt track full of rocks, roots, and holes.
There was such an overload of sights to take in. Children playing on the roads, old women lugging a bamboo basket overflowing with firewood, villagers toiling in the rice fields, stalls selling all sorts of fruits and vegetables, a whole family riding on a motorcycle, overloaded cargo trucks, a guy driving a motorcycle while holding his IV drip tied to a stick, a rooster the size of a toddler with crazy scars. I wish I could've photographed all of it, but I couldn't with the violent movement.
Ok, this story actually happened over 4 bus rides, but I smashed it into just one. Whatever, it's my blog!
