Vientiane

From Train to Bangkok

Amidst our trek north, further into Laos, I turned to Susanna after being on the VIP bus for maybe 10 minutes and said, "There is no way in hell I'm getting back on this bus for the return trip." And we didn't. Thankfully, she shared my view of avoiding at all costs, a total of 9 hours on buses back tracking to the Thailand border. So we booked flights on Laos Air for eighty bucks. A price I gladly paid. The flight back to Vientiane was 45 minutes. The folks from the tubing group that made it all the way to Luang Prabang, all (except one) went their separate ways from there. I guess they had similar opinions of more busing. The one that remained was Reese. He was headed back to Bangkok to sort out his visa and buy some more tattoo equipment for his shop in Koh Tao.

Back in Vientiane, we posted up for a night to catch another train south into Bangkok the following day. That night Reese and I ventured out for a late dinner and saw a new part of town. Up until this point, we've managed to avoid the seedy parts of many towns, but this changed in Vientiane. On a mission for noodle soup, Reese and I walked up and down block after block, including the ones with she-male hookers and locals asking us if we were interested in some opium. A fruitless search ended at a posh bar that willing to make us french fries as long as we ordered drinks. Nothing like beer and fried potatoes for a balanced meal.

The next day was basically filled with time killers. Breakfast was a bust - A Scandinavian bakery with no bacon and stale donuts. We bowled and Sus beat me. Unfortunately the tech savvy Loa Bowling Center wasn't able to print the score card so there is no official record of that ever happening. Sus got a massage and broken from my defeat, I turned to the bottle and snooker tables. Those tables are enormous!

Getting to the train in Nung Khai went smoothly. We even ran into the American/Japanese family from the waterfall again. Like I said before, when you're on a popular tour route, chances are, so is everyone else. The Train ride was OK, but the sleeping arrangements were miserable. I was prepared for fan class, but I slept on the bottom on the way up to Laos. Sus requested we swap and I found out why as soon as I turned in for the night. The lights never go out on the train and the top bunk is directly next to the florescent lighting. All night it was light and of course the bed a foot and a half too short for me. All calculated, turned into the worst night of sleep on the entire trip.

Oh, how could I forget, the suspicious techie. When we got on the train there's a guy set up diagonally from us with a laptop connected to four cell phones and a GPS, all being powered by two car batteries, that were tied down with bungee chords. Terrorist, bombs free radical, who knows? I was a little wary at first because guy didn't sleep all night. But he did seem to know the stewards. And after glancing at his screen, I think he was physically tracking the course/progress of the train. Possibly for future mapping/routes. Those eccentric techies!