The bus to Savannakhet starts at 7, so no breakfast, but stress, because the hotel manager doesn't let me go until having checked the room. He probably thinks I'm stealing his cheap bedclothes.
It is no surprise that the streets are even more sleepy than during the day, so deadly still. No one to be seen. It's Sunday, so somehow understandable. A journey of almost 500 kilometers is waiting for me, in Laos the equivalent of at least 10 hours drive.
Wonderful! For me, these are the highlights of every trip, and whenever we approach our destination, I long to just keep going, endlessly, or ever further.
No idea why it's like that.
Laotian Beauties
I am expected at the bus station. Everything goes quickly, my backpack is loaded.
The boring picture of the people hanging around, most of them still half asleep, is brightened up by a Laotian beauty waiting quietly and somehow entranced for the departure. She's wearing a pair of baggy pants, perfectly matching the wine-red sweater and emphasizing her slim figure.
And all this on an early Sunday morning. In Laos!
The world in the eye of the observer
Once again I am the only foreigner on the bus, so it will be another one of those silent days. The passengers do not give the impression of being interested in a tourist, so I make myself comfortable at my window seat: water, food, diary, camera, travel guide, jacket.
Across the aisle two well-dressed boys with strangely serious faces sit, no smiles, their eyes straight ahead. I would like to talk to them, ask them where they are from and where they are headed, find out the reason for their strange behavior. But it will not come to that.
The imagination starts to work. Are they perhaps on their way to relatives (whom they do not like)? Or to school where they don't feel comfortable? Would they rather have taken the plane and not that run-down bus? Are they orphans? Are they brothers? Why so serious?
I will never know.
No houses, no villages, no roads
At each stop, people leave the bus, loosen up their muscles or piss in the bushes. A few have reached their destination and it is difficult to imagine where they are going. No houses, no village, no roads.
But others get on, the bus is full. It is getting hot, very hot, and only the wind through the open window brings some relief. Sometimes I doze off, wake up with a heavy head, turn back to the world passing by outside the window. The area is getting drier now, the grazing animals leaner. Where will they find something to feed on?
We follow the Mekong, meandering not visible to us towards the south. Thailand is close, the river is the very border in many places. In the north, I read, there are numerous nature sanctuaries, but also areas, better to stay away. Those are the places with dangerous remains of the massive bombardment by the American troops.
From time to time the bus stops at the usual locations, people rush to the stalls, to the restaurant, to the toilet.
Exciting and boring
That's how we drive for hours, as exciting as it is boring, just as I imagined it would be and as I love it.
But eventually we arrive, the laotian beauty I met at Vientiane disappears forever without a single glance back.
The hotel (a term I would no longer use later) is off the beaten track, so I take a TukTuk and off we go. The driver - the left hand casually on his hashish cigarette, the right on the steering wheel - knows the way and roars in hair-raising speed through the streets to the destination.
A horrible room
It's not very expensive, but unfortunately you can tell. The manager, a rather grim specimen of a Laotian, leads me through a poorly lit room to a steep staircase that ends up in a peculiar room.
A carpet (!) lies in front of the bed, looking so awful that I swear not to set foot on it. At least there is a bathroom with a hot shower, but the mirror at the sink is missing. Not a place for a longer stay. Even for me, accustomed to many things, this is a borderline case.
I choose the first restaurant for supper but it turns out to be a real sucker. Overpriced, poor quality.
Savannakhet is definitely not a place to stay. Hopefully tomorrow at this time I will be in Pakxe, close to the 4000 islands.
P.S. Matching Song: Edgar Broughton Band - Hotel Room
And here the journey continues ...
