Another long day on the bad roads of Laos; From Luang Namtha I went to Oudom Xai. And from there to Nong Kiaw. The first part of the trip wasn’t too bad.

We were in a proper bus and the potholes were not as big as on the way to Luang Namtha. After having been in Myanmar for a month I wasn’t to surprised to find out that there weren’t any more busses to Nong Kiaw that day. It seems like most busses leave before noon in Asia. Petra however really wanted to go to Nong Kiaw that day and so she started to negotiate a pick-up truck for the little group of six backpackers that had been on the bus to Oudom Xai. And how she negotiated! She went in like a pit pull and didn’t let go until she had managed to cut the price from 400,000 kip to 200,000. Good girl.
In the end however the driver came out a fair bit ahead since he simply filled the pick-up with other people who also wanted to go to Nong Kiaw, even though we had made it very clear that we would hire the whole pick-up. Petra nearly threw a family with a small, apparently sick, baby out of the car when it arrived 45 minutes later, but we managed to convince her to simply accept that it was the way it was.

What we hadn’t known of course was that our driver was a crazy maniac who quite obviously regrets that there is no Formula 1 course in Laos. But hey – what are mountain roads for? This guy went through the serpentines at a speed that was simply ridiculous. I tried to comfort myself with the thought that maybe, just maybe, he was doing this for our own safety. After all, local busses are sometimes being shot at in this part of Laos and I’m positive that no bullet could have caught up with his driving.

Unfortunately though the road was very long and very, very winding and soon we all regretted the hurried lunch that we’d had in Oudom Xai. Every few seconds we had to hold on tight to the sides of the pick up – else we would have been thrown onto the other side of the little “cage” that holds the passengers on the back of the car. To take our minds off the curves, the drive and certain death we started to sing each and every song that came to our minds, including but not limited to U2, the Beatles, various national anthems and lullabies. Unfortunately this tactic didn’t work for everyone – the Swiss guy on the truck puked his guts out for the whole three hours that our trip took.

One thing that really confused me is how the road was paved. It was partly dirt road and partly paved. That in itself would be so strange. But it was not, like, 80 kilometer asphalt and 40 kilometers dirt or something like that. No, it was always 200 meters of paved road, then 100 meters of dirt, then 100 meters of pavement then another 50 meters of dirt and so on. I mean – huh???