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A woman with a face like crumpled leather leans through the bus
window, jabbing at me with a plastic bag full of freshly fried
crickets.
Down at my dusty feet, a troupe of sweaty, reeking piglets swirm
inside a plastic sack. No, this isn't an episode of Fear Factor.
It's public transport Laos style.
Travelling cheap in South-east Asia's more impoverished regions
of Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar means sometimes things get a little
thorny.
The scenery is dazzling with lush valleys and swaying palm-lined
arid plains, but inside the buses, trucks and pick-ups, there is a
war going on.
Here the notion of personal space is unfathomable, and there is
likely to be a farmyard's worth of animals stalking the floor,
while higher up, a cocktail of saliva is airborne.
These are countries where they use an ox and cart to get around,
where water buffaloes plough the paddies and some people break
rocks all day just to earn $1. There are no Big Macs and ATMs are
almost impossible to find.
Road travel in the relatively richer neighbouring nations of
Thailand and Malaysia is, by comparison, like a jaunt on the Orient
Express. Their buses usually have leg room, icy air-con and maybe
even an onboard waitress. But for a slice of adventure, forget
canyoning, sidestep base jumping and try local transport it's
cheaper, too. To help here's a few tried-and-tested
recommendations:
FOR $NZ15, I took a rattling, rundown bus from Vang Vieng to
Phonosavan in Laos. It's only about 130km, but thanks to the
altitude and a windy road, it takes about eight hours.
I have an actual screwed-to-the-floor seat, so that's a good
start. It's wobbly, stained, ripped and too small, but it's mine
for the rest of the day.
Because the bus company sells more tickets than there are seats,
plenty of others aren't so fortunate. Pink and orange plastic
stools litter the aisle as makeshift seating, a handful of
commuters hang out the door and another 10, including a
congregation of orange-robed monks, balance on the roof.
Taking up the rest of the space inside are free-roaming piglets
and chickens. And from the squealing and crowing coming from the
roof, there's obviously more lashed alongside the luggage. A
piglet dashes up and down the aisle, relieving itself as it goes.
What starts as cute ends up unpleasantly fragrant.
The good fortune of having my own seat does not last. The guy
compressed into the space next to me decides to muster up several
oversized globs of phlegm, spits and rubs each into the seat in
front of us. Okay, maybe it's cultural; perhaps I just hope his
aim holds out.
Motion sickness should to be declared a national epidemic in
Laos, because half the passengers spend the trip (yep, it is a
windy road, but the driver is only going 20km/h) vomiting into
complimentary plastic bags.
With conveyor-belt precision, the full bags are cautiously
passed along the rows and tossed out the window. Halfway through
the trip, the driver has to stop to buy extra bags.
To make me a little uneasy, up the front of the bus sits a
gun-wielding soldier, I can't tell an AK47 from a Derringer (a
skill I have yet to need), but it's big enough to be noticed. A
few years ago, Hmong bandits attacked vehicles on a couple of major
routes in Laos and since then, soldiers have esorted buses for
safety reasons. For more adventure, I tripped from Cambodia's
Kompong Cham to Siem Reap five to six hours of travel, the first
leg in a bus, the second in a pick-up for about $10.
By heartbreaking misfortune, this bus has onboard entertainment
and the television/video's volume is switched to maximum the
split-second we take off.
It's a karoke style video featuring an excessively camp Thai
man playing tricks on hapless villagers. Sadly, it's not the first
time I have seen these videos this guy is the Elvis of Asia.
After listening twice to every song the guy has ever made, the
entertainment system flicks over to Vanilla Ice's greatest hits.
Luckily, no one sings along.
Lunch turns out to be a gourmet banquet. Whenever we pull over,
even if it's only for a millionth of a second, a gang of hawkers
swoop in bearing trays and baskets full of mind-boggling cuisine.
Along with barbequed chickens, oranges and bunches of leafy greens
are fried crickets, grilled rats, and half-fertilised coloured
eggs. It's almost a shame I'm a vegetarian.
It's the dry season in the land of the Khmer and that means
bucket loads of dust. I am now in the back of a pick-up, balancing
on a trestle seat, and there's dust in my nose, ears, eyes.
Everyone who's along for the ride looks like he's had a sack of
neon-coloured orange flour dumped over his head. Regrettably, the
clownish look does frighten off other potential commuters.
The unbreakable code of these pick-up drivers is: Never say no
to one more passenger. Maybe it's capitalism, maybe they like to
liven up the day aiming for some Guinness Book of Records feat, or
perhaps they're just nice guys who can't say no.
Whatever the reason, I now have an assortment of armpits in my
face and a child squashing my feet.
The lunch banquet was too much for one passenger, who has (I
will word this as tactfully as possible) an ill-timed attack from
her liquidy bowels. She is in the pick-up's cab, next to the
driver, one of four squashed in the front seat, and I am in the row
behind without a door. Stomach-churning does not begin to describe
my feelings.
Amazingly, no one says a word to the unfortunate woman, who
makes a quick change of outfit while her friends clean up. Fifteen
minutes later, she is back in her seat, the windows are right down
and the expedition continues. To round off the trip, 10km from Siem
Reap, the driver, a hefty man who appears never to have let a smile
settle on his lips, pulls over on a quiet stretch of road. With the
air of a dark alley drug deal, he demands payment from all
passengers.
Unsurprisingly, everyone quickly and quietly pays up and he gets
back behind the wheel.
Now, just when I suppose things can't get more intriguing, they
do.
Two-thirds of way into a 20-hour bus trip ($16) from Inle Lake
to Yangon in Myanmar (it used to be called Burma) travelling went
from interesting to terrifying.
By good fortune I have a seat in the back of the bus and that's
part of the reason I survive unscathed.
To start with, the air-conditioning does not work (why would
it?) and it feels like 40C. Even the monks drip with sweat. Because
there's an air-conditioning system, albeit non-functioning, the
windows are sealed shut. I hallucinate about fresh air.
The electrics of the television/video work just fine, so I get
to watch and listen to (there's no escape when the volume is at
maximum) a succession of Jean Claude Van Damme movies.
Belgium's action man is followed by a swish-haired old crooner
singing his heart out alongside a group of beautiful young dancing
Burmese girls. It looks so ridiculous to start with that I think it
has to be joke.
All this is interrupted several times by military checkpoints.
At each checkpoint, every Burmese person must get off the bus and
show their identity documents at the guard post, the bus is
searched and then everyone can get back on.
The oppressive junta is fighting Shan State Army somewhere to
the east and north of here.
Later, after midnight, the video is off and everyone is trying
to sleep.
The road is skinny, it's sealed, and a line of logging trucks
is parked only partly off to the side. I don't know what happened,
maybe the driver fell asleep, maybe the trucks did not have their
lights on.
The crash jolts everyone awake. Passengers up front are
screaming and the bus is clogged with smoke. The windows are
sealed, so we can't get out until someone finds the emergency exit
at the back of the bus.
Out in the road, I can see giant logs, of all different lengths,
are rammed into the front of the bus. For five rows back, those on
the driver's side are squashed between twisted seats.
There are no ambulances or emergency services. It is the fragile
passengers who pull the twisted bus away from the truck and use
whatever they can find to free those trapped.
The injured are taken away on the back of a tractor-cum-cart to
a nearby hospital and a man in a uniform does little more than wave
on passing traffic. At least one person up front died. I will never
know what happened to the rest.
I think it will be a while before I get on a bus again.
There are plenty of memorable trips I missed like the torturous
18 to 20-hour cross border journey from Bangkok, Thailand to Siem
Reap. The road on the Cambodian side of the border, with pot holes
bigger than a jacuzzi, is the stuff of travellers' legends.
There's the long-distance haul from the Laos capital of
Vientiane to Hanoi in Vietnam, which takes more than a day in a
bus, but less than an hour by plane. Here foreigners are eschewed
in deference to the more precious boxes and crates.
In Burma, a trip on the government train from Yangon to Mandalay
takes about 14 hours, but can run 24 hours late that's if it
doesn't derail, which apparently is not uncommon.
I dodged all sorts of adventures endured by other
adventure-seeking travellers. The luckless were caked with vomit or
spent half a day clinging to ropes balancing on a pyramid of cargo
on the back of a pick-up.
Others recounted how they had to hunch forward for endless
hours, the plastic stool supply depleted, while fellow passengers
lay in hammocks strung from the bus ceiling. A few had children
thrust at them, which they were begged by local people to adopt.
Some had more sinister encounters fending off groping and leering
fellow passengers.
Of course, I could have avoided all this theatre and dashed by
in the comfort of a hired air-conditioned car with driver, or a
special VIP, just-for-tourists, bus.
But I would have missed a lot of soaring globs of saliva, fried
cricket legs and urinating piglets.
I would have missed getting to know people who survive on barely
a $1 a day and who will never have the chance to leave their
country. And I would not be the expert I am at some peculiar blend
of sign language jumbled with pidgin Asian-English.
Source: Taranaki Daily
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