Maja Nordlund

You know how some busjourneys can feel sooo long, like you become a kid again, asking when we're gonna get there? That's how it felt on the 27 hour long (yea, you read right!) journey from Hanoi to Luang Prabang in Laos. It was a sleeperbus, which means there's not normal seats, it's kinda bed-seats, so you can lay down in it and actually have a good nights sleep while the bus is still going. This sleeperbus though, weren't exactly the same as the other ones we've been on. This one only had sleeper-seats on the top and hard mattresses underneath, so narrow that you had to crawl onto your mattress and stay down for the whole 27 hours, with NO windows to look out through!! How weird is that??!! Evelina got so lucky that she got the last upperseat, but I felt quite comfty on my mattress with a lot of space for my legs, so I didn't actually mind after the first shock was over.

 

One thing I've could have skipped though is when this man (one of the bus-staff) poked at me, trying to tell me to move closer to the wall. "Nooo, I'm sleeping here, and you're not gonna share mattress with me!" I tried to tell him in both bad English (so he'll more easily would understand... :p) and body language (covering up the mattress so he wouldn't get on). He understood me after a while, and started poking at the English gut on the madress beside me. But he pretended to be asleep, so the busman just climbed over him and lay down behind him on his mattress. Felt so sorry for the English guy, since the had to lay cuddled up like that for 26 more hours..!

 

The night went quite quickly and when the morning came we were let of by the Vietnam-Lao border. There we sat for an hour before we could get our passports checked and pay for the visa. But since our tour-bus from Halong Bay had been so late, we hadn't had any chance to change our Vietnamies dong to US dollars (which you have to have for the visa, nomatter how weird it sounds..!). So me and Evelina ended up paying 8 dollars extra (but in dong currency) for the fact that we payed with their neighbour countries money.. But the totalt price for our visa (40$) was still cheaper than the visa the Canadian people had to pay for theirs..!

 

We expected them to make a breakfast stop, since there were no restaurants or mini-markets at the border (obviously). But it wasn't until 2 pm they actually stopped at a restaurant so they could eat lunch! By this time just a couple of us had gone out of the bus, when the drivers starts honking, shuts the door, and starting to drive away! We ran up to him and trid to explain that we had to eat, but the just spoke to us in Vietnamies, and kept going. Left behind. We didn't know what to believe or what to do. Was he comming back for us? What did all the people in the bus say? Evelina was still on it! But we just sat down and had our breakfast, and after 15 minutes or so, the rest of the travellers came in to the restaurant telling us the bus had stopped around the corner and now we had half an hour to spend eating!

 

They kept the schedule quite well, and the arrived in Luang Prabang after exactly 27 hours! Since it was late and the beginning of New Year (which we had no idea of!) the whole town was quite closed. We shared a tuk-tuk with the two Canadian girls we'd met on the bus and the guy from England (who had to sleep beside the bus-man). Found a nice hotel and fell asleep, not knowing anything about what was gonna happen to us the following three days! Kinda needs its own insert on this blog....!! Looong (but really fun) story!