So in our last  post (in german), we took the plane shortcut from Phonsavan to Vientiane on our way South, convinced to just pass by quickly from Laos capital city having heard not so exciting things about the city and being by now quite tight in our schedule… We keep repeating it: one year is just not enough for this ;-).

On the same flight from Xieng Khouang (Phonsavan) we met a retired swiss doctor who was trying to convince us to stay a bit longer in the city and see this and that and that temple, and this street…. So we shared with him the Taxi into town and decided to spend the rest of the day visiting the few main attractions, and planned on taking the night bus to Pakse, a city in southern Laos.

Get off the taxi and notice whe have not been thinking this through. What do we want to see, where do we go next, what options do we have? But most importantly, where do we leave our big backpacks while we visit the city? Not even the time to start thinking about a solution, we are facing another problem: It’s really hot and humid today. Ok let’s find a café with aircon and wifi and make a more accurate plan.

The coffee was ok and the wifi good enough, so we had a new plan, let’s go to the travel agency recommended by Lonely Planet, they should not be too bad. Too bad it’s sunday though….

Agency is closed, so we stand in front of the shut door, still with our big backpacks and a puzzled face. That’s when a retired Swedish ex-football star on an e-bike came to our help. He works for a local school and is involved in more than a football team as a moral and technical guide to local players. At least that’s what he told us… He advises all tourists he meets to avoid tuktuk drivers and in our case he made up a pretty good plan for us: He accompanied us to a nearby hostel where we were able to leave our bags for the day, book a ticket on the night bus including pickup, and have a shower. At the hostel we could – no, we should – also have rented a bike for a quicker city tour, but we thought we just walk a bit…

see the attraction from far away and walk towards it…

walk…

and walk….

and walk… getting hotter and hotter…

and walk and walk past a huge barrel… what? must be the heat… no it’s really a huge barrel 🙂

guess what: walk….

 

finally there…. but, of course, you need to walk all the way back 🙂 why didn’t we rent a bike again ???

  

We must admit, we haven’t seen a lot of Vientiane, but it didn’t seem to us a particularly interesting city. It’s not fair to the city to judge by just that little time, but that’s how it was, unfair, and off we go towards “wilder” parts of Laos…

 

We have already mentioned some really uncomfortable and stressful bus or minivan rides during previous stages of our travel, so we were not expecting very much from our planned 15 hours trip to 4000 islands.

Picked up by a tuktuk, you are taken to the bus station and are presented with “king of bus” 😀

that’s where you’ll spend the night. Unexpectedly, and with hindsight, this was probably the best of all our bus trips in south east asia. You get a very narrow but comfortable enough bed, which you must share with another person. In our case we were REALLY happy to be travelling as a couple. Solo travelers got to make new intimate friends during the night bus ride with people who were complete strangers before starting… Like our japanese friend Ken, whom we met again after having met him on the Mekong, and on top of Luang Prabangs hill. He just took out his electronic dictionary and seemed to get along well with his Laotian neighbor…

You also get a free lunch and a bottle of water. This is what I call customer service.

The bus drives not so slowly on not so nice roads, but in our case had to stop several times to fix some problem on the rear wheel – sometimes for almost an hour. We actually don’t want to know what was wrong…We slept for long parts of the trip… So we arrived with quite a bit of delay in Pakse, where we should have gotten onto a minivan to drive us to the 4000 islands. We had the feeling the actual minivan had already left, and we could get on the orange bus instead. OK, no problem, we’ll be fine with the orange bus, we thought…

The orange bus does not break – it honks…. If you are a motorbike, or a chariot pulled by buffalos, or a bicycle, or a pedestrian or one of the many dogs standing in the middle of the street: honking means “I am coming, no matter what happens…”… almost no matter….

As we have it already as the title image you might imagine what comes next…. we are close to falling asleep again, when we hear a sound almost like we hit something, or someone – hopefully not…. It was luckily “just” a tyre which exploded, dirt was being thrown up in the air inside the bus as the driver slowed down from his cruise speed, and the tourist sitting on top of the tyre was running as if she had seen a huge spider…. The driver stopped the bus (in the middle of the street of course and in the middle of nowhere) and started analyzing the problem…. No one except him believed he would be able to solve it by his own, but to our surprise, he started lifting the bus, removing one by one the nuts with a huge metal lever, removing the flat tyre, and the one next to it (which seemed intact). By that time (about an hour later) he was already soaked by rainshowers and sweat, but nobody seemed to be able or willing to help him. He was not looking for help either. All tourists on the bus seeked shelter in a nearby “restaurant”: This was basically a hut, with no proper floor in it (some wood, but not everywhere) and an open air kitchen, which seemed to be serving the local farmers or some family members during lunch time, and a small roof.

Only now we saw the driver on the phone. We thought he might call for help, but we were again wrong… shortly after, he magically made the spare wheel appear, managed to remove it from below the bus, and mount it where the exploded one was. He even put the broken tyre back in the bus! A hero!

As if nothing had happened he continued on with his usual driving style, with no further damage…