Travel Stories

December 24, 11pm, Vinh, Vietnam, by Xerxes Marduk

Part 1

It was a truly epic bus journey to get to Vietnam. I started at 5am this morning, and have been on the same bus for 17 hours. The day started off good enough. I showed up at the wrong bus station an hired a tuk-tuk to drive me through the pre-dawn streets of Phonsavan, Lao, to the right bus station. Once I got on my bus, and we started moving, the driver used the horn like It ws a snow plow to clear a path through mopeds, bicycles, children, dogs, hogs, cows. We must have passed an average of 100 mopeds per hour, which would mean we passed at least 1,700, this is not an exaggeration. It is amazing that we didn't hit any.

The bus was a couple of hours late arriving in Vinh, but there is no such thing as a time table when there are 101 unpredictable delays on the road into Vietnam. To cite just a few: boulders the size of bath tubs in the road, solution: wait until a bulldozer pushed them off into a deep ravine; problem - maniac dump truck drivers who playfully swerve all over the road when the bus tries to pass them, solution: back off and give them some room; problem - truck parked in the middle of the road and the driver is no where to be seen, solution: build a bridge of rocks to drive over, inches away from the edge of the cliff (intelligently most people got off the bus during this dangerous maneuver, just in case the bus took a tumble). Problem - boulders the size of microwaves strewn across the road for 50 feet in front of us, solution: everybody gets off to help clear a path through them, it's a team effort! All these we encountered and many more. It took, on average, 30 minutes to clear each of these obstacles, making a 40km descent through the mountains take 5 hours. Sure, when the road they are building between Lao and Vietnam is finished it will be really convenient and fast, in the mean time its hardly suitable for buses.

The border formalities took one and a half hours. Not unreasonable considering what took place. The bus was searched twice, from top to bottom, once on each side of the border. On the Vietnam side they hauled a passenger off with all of his luggage, consisting of half a dozen cardboard boxes. A border guard told me the man had "forbidden medicine." He never got back on the bus and I never saw him again. What kind of medicine he was transporting I don't know, but as the guards ruffled through the poor guys boxes they left little packets containing come kind of pills laying about on the bus. I picked one up for closer inspection later.

The guards took inquisitive interest in my passport. They kept passing it from one to another and exclaiming loudly over it. I was questioned by many different guards; where are you from? What do you do? Are you married? Why do you come to Vietnam? To this last question I answered, because its beautiful and its people are so friendly. I don't think the guard understood my answer. They searched my backpack, and even pried into my envelope containing little bits of paper with scrawled email addresses and various other nick knacks I have accumulated in the past five months. By chance a little red leaf - given to me ages ago in a far away place - fell out and landed between the guards black boots on the dusty concrete. I experiences a moment of fear that it might blow away and that would be the last time I saw it, but the guard bent down and picked it up. Handing me back my belongings he said, with a slight apologetic look in his eyes, "Beautiful." Weather he meant the red leaf or something else he saw in there I will never know.

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