When I travel to Laos my fellow teachers always ask how my "vacation" was. It's hard to explain that Laos is a landlocked country and definitely not the Riviera! And in the rainy season traveling on dirt roads can be especially tricky. Getting up to my wife's parent's village, about a four hour (with no problems) trip can be a challenge during the rainy season (our summer). I thought for fun I would post a few photos from my trip back from Bai's village to Vientiane. It's always sort of a crap shoot about what the bus will be like and this time it was one of the more run-down buses I've been on.
Just about ten minutes from Bai's village is this one hill that becomes very difficult to get up when it's been raining and the logging trucks, etc. have chewed up the road. You can see the bus I was riding at the bottom of the hill after it slid off to the side after trying to get up. The bus to the right tried to pull us out, which it finally did, bu then we then had to wait for about an hour until a logging truck came that somehow, when it went up the hill, compacted the mud so the bus could make it up.
And then, about an hour later there was a big pop and whesh of air as one of the tires went flat.
And here's one of our YouTube videos of a bus trying to make it up the same hill. If you watch the video you have to think of the book "The Little Train that Could!"
And both times it was lightly raining as we (the passengers) had to wait out in the rain until the bus finally made it up the hill.
But when you travel in Laos, you just have to be relaxed and the problems always seem to take care of themselves and usually something will happen that turns a "lemon" situation into lemonade.
For those of you who might be thinking of ever going on one of our tours, don't worry, we don't travel on buses as we rent vans for our travel groups! But when Bai and I travel on our own, it doesn't bother us to take the bus. It's just part of being in Laos...
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