Sleeping on the job?

A phone shot from the bus on the road to Savannakhet in Laos. She looks very comfortable and I think the dog likes being in charge!

The first time I made the trip from Hue to Savannakhet was 18 years ago. It turned out to be one of my most adventurous journeys. I couldn’t find any information about a public bus to the border despite going to the bus station so I booked a tour to the Demilitarized Zone and got off the tour at the town closest to the border. There were 6 others doing the same. We got motorbike taxis to the border but they stopped at a cafe a couple of kilometres away and told us we had to wait. No explanation why. Two women turned up shortly after and offered to change money at atrocious rates. They then told us that we had to have Lao Kip, that the bus on the other side didn’t take US dollars and there was nowhere on the other side to change money (none of this was true). Gradually everyone caved and changed some money until I was the only one left holding out. When the motorbike drivers told us time to go one woman offered me the correct exchange rate but I said no.

We got to the border and 3 Scandinavian girls were turned back. At that time you needed a special permit to exit Vietnam overland and they didn’t have it. So I went into Laos with 2 British guys and a Japanese guy. It was mid-afternoon and there were no bus leaving the border until the morning. We found a cafe to have lunch. I went to the bank (a table in an empty room) and changed money. When I got back from the bank the guys had found a Vietnamese truck driver who was willing to take us to Savannakhet. We negotiated a price and jumped in the truck, two in the cab and two in the back. I was in the cab.

It seemed like a great idea in the middle of the afternoon. It seemed like less of a good idea a few hours later when it was dark and we were waiting by the side of the road for the driver to fix the truck! By 11pm we’d broken down twice and the driver was falling asleep at the wheel. The road at that time was 240km of potholes but there was very little traffic. There was a scary moment when the driver failed to see, or was falling asleep, the only other truck that we’d seen on the road for several hours and drove straight towards it. We shouted at him and the guy sitting next to him grabbed the wheel. The driver stopped at the next village and bought some red bull. By that point I was getting pretty desperate to get off the truck but we were in the middle of nowhere and I couldn’t see anything that looked like a hotel. With my limited Vietnamese I understood from the driver that we’d go a bit further then stop. We kept the windows open and the red bull seemed to work. After another hour we arrived at a truck rest stop and the driver told us to sleep in the back of the truck. I was very happy that I had a sleeping bag with me as it was really cold. In the morning we continued. About 30km out of Savannakhet we changed from the truck to a tuk-tuk but I can’t remember if it was because the truck broke down again or because the driver was going a different way.

Today’s trip had an odd start but was very straightforward and I’m happy to be in a comfortable hotel tonight and not sleeping in the back of a truck! I’d tried to buy my bus ticket yesterday when I arrived in Hue but the office for buses to Laos was out of bounds because of construction and after walking around all the other offices in the rain, someone told me I should just go to the bus station in the morning. At the hotel they offered to book the ticket for me. This happens everywhere in Vietnam and involves being booked onto special tourist buses which are much more expensive than public buses or paying a hefty commission to the hotel or travel agency for them to buy a public bus ticket. For these two weeks I’ve avoided that and bought my own tickets but I was stressed about leaving it until the morning since I had to leave the country or get in trouble with the immigration authorities and was worried the bus might be full. I should have trusted my instinct and done it independently but I asked the hotel to make the booking. They told me a bus would pick me up from the hotel and take me to the bus station and put me on the bus to Laos.

No bus picked me up. A guy came on a motorbike just as it was starting to rain again. Not happy – part of the reason I went for the hotel option was to get to the bus station without getting wet. At the bus station the motorbike driver took the ticket the hotel issued me and went through the construction site to the ticket office while I waited in the rain. He came back with an official bus ticket gave half to the bus driver and refused to give me the other half when I asked for it. I told him I needed the ticket, he said no, got on the bus and showed me my seat. I continued insisting on having the ticket since it was my only proof that I’d paid for the journey and he got more aggressive in saying he was keeping the ticket. I took the ticket out of his hand and he yelled at me but didn’t take it back. Then he got off the bus and left. I don’t know whether he could get paid twice if he had my ticket or whether the bus driver would charge me again later in the journey if I couldn’t show my ticket and he would get a cut. Very strange. And annoying that essentially I paid way over the odds for a motorbike taxi and to get yelled at! I love Vietnam but there are some things I hate about it. The way you have to be alert for scams is one of them and it seems that borders mean more scams so visitors get a bad first or last impression of the country.


The rest of the journey went very smoothly. I was sitting next to a Lao woman who teaches English in Savannakhet so I had someone to talk to. The border post has been upgraded. The border town on the Lao side has grown. The road has been paved and was smooth and fast. And as we got to the border the clouds started to lift and the sun came out. Laos has a different climate to central Vietnam. I arrived in Savannakhet about 5pm and the first thing I did when I got to the hotel was to empty my backpack and hang the contents around the room and over the balcony to dry. Originally I was going to leave tomorrow but I’ve decided to stay for a day to make sure everything has dried out before I pack up again.