After a shower you go outside and within 5 minutes you need another shower. This is early in the morning as well. We have decided to spend our last day doing the tourist thing and having an early super before our 22 hour bus ride to Hanoi.
First we walk the 20 minute walk to the bus station, saying no to all the tuk tuk drivers, which I now do in laos and with pleasure. Oh and the standing joke amoung backpackers in loas is saying souhadi which is good morning. Don't ask why its funny it just is!
Finally we find bus 14 and get on. No air conditioning on this one and full of locals with all their wares. We do trip on the bumpiest roads yet to the Buddha park. A really nice local student who just got his grades, which were all bad except english, chats to us the whole journey. Which was nice as we learnt in april its the water festival, where they throw water over one another of course. Think this is common in south east asia.
Eventually we get to the buddha park which is the surrealist thing I have seen. About the size of a small cses a collection of small and large Budha images. Its the weirdest thing to see. One you climb through a small opening and up some steep stairs and stand at the top and look at the park. That was great. It also has a large collection of hindu shrines and images as well.
After that the bus journey back. We thought we would be waiting for hours and the student told us the last bus was at six and they come when ever they want. So we sit down expecting the long wait and a bus shows up within two minutes. Great we thought.
A coupleof two men get on. One of them we find out is the local nutter or possibly one of those bandits from the north. Brenda and I are sitting at the back of the bus, and none of the locals at that point wanted to sit next to us. I am sitting by the window and Brenda on the other side. Next thing we know the local nutter has sat next to brenda and is strating to talk to us. He was 24 born in 1975 (go figure even my maths isn't that bad). He is a proffesssor and taught himself, has problems with the police in thailand, only has 2000kip (which is nothing) and all his money and passport were somewhere else (he was smartly dressed), and most importantly "HE IS THE LION KING!!!!" He kept saying this and waving his 2000k bill "I am THE LION KING". When we refused to give him our contact details, by that time he was all over Brenda, and Brenda was practically sitting on my lap to get away from him, he was getting aggressive and anxious.
The other man that got on the bus started speaking to him in laos and the argument then got heated with the odd word we could make out "you are a BAD man". The nut case then got off the bus still arguing with the other guy and bashed the window as the bus drove off. They were still shouting at one another and thank god the glass was tough as the bus drove off. The bus driver was then going to stop a few feet away and the other guy and people on the bus shouted at him to keep going and we did.
Turns out the other guy was a soldier for the laos army and didn't like people like that hasseling tourists, and especially western females probably, as it gave laos a bad name.
We get back after our adventure decide to find somewhere and have a coke and meet Allan (one of the two guys from louang probang) who buys us a beer after we meet him again later. We were complaining we didn't have enough kip for a beer as we didn't want to change any money tod sake its only a dollar and bought us one.
Next we were ready for our 22hr bus journey.
Posted by alexd at March 28, 2004 08:45 AM