Ten minutes later, we were off again. This time we got a few hundred meters down the road before stopping again to pick up more passengers. That brought the total to 26 adults, 3 children, and at least one rooster. Off again, we went all of 20 meters before turning abruptly into a mechanics shop. With all of us still in the back, they jacked up the pickup, took off a wheel, and proceeded to patch the huge slash in one of the tires. We waited, literally, for glue to dry.
While doing that, an old woman appointed herself group comedian. Naturally, the two falang on board were the target of her humor. It must have been riotous stuff because everyone on the bus was having a great time, but I felt a little like a zoo animal. Later on, the old lady noticed that I was in just the right contorted position to be used as an arm rest and did just that. That also got a few laughs.
The wheel finally on again, we piled back into the songthaew ...and went another 50m to the other bus station. All told, it took us over an hour and a half to go the first kilometer. The other hundred or so only took two more hours, as it should normally.Champasak, after all the effort, wasn't actually that impressive. Zoot got sick right away and spent the whole time in bed. I spent the days there exploring on bike and seeing Wat Pho,
the Angkorian temple sight that everyone had recommended. It was nice, but small, scorching hot, crawling with tourists, and in awful shape. The many temples I've seen since have been nicer and much more accessible.From Champasak, we hopped another songthaew -this one was speedy- to Don Det in the Si Phan Don region at the southern tip of Laos. It's a spot in the Mekong where the river fans out and there are thousands of little islands.
Zoo still being sickish, I went off in search of a bicycle to explore the island on my own -maybe see the waterfalls or endangered river dolphins. Just as I left the guesthouse though, a random guy stopped me and asked if I wanted to go for a boat ride. Being skeptical, I said no at first, but it turned out he needed to go cut bamboo and just wanted company. He said not to worry and that we'd be back by two. So I and Brit I'd met on the ferry over hopped into the guy's longtail boat and we headed off.First, he said we had to pick up some of his friends to help, so we stopped at one's house. He offered us lunch so we all chipped in a little and he went off to buy some fish. As we were waiting, they gave us an endless supply of snacks and homemade lao lao. Each time they passed the glass, they poured only a little bit, but the glass made the rounds at least a dozen times. After over an hour, the guy finally came back with fish and they started grilling it. I was already beginning to suspect the four hour estimate would be way off. Lunch was awesome, but only the first guy we met spoke any English so Owen and I were a bit in the dark.
After the slow lunch, we grabbed a couple liters of lao lao for the road and went diving for freshwater clams. I'm pretty miserable at it, mostly because I was kind of sketched out swimming in the oh-so-clean Mekong and getting all that nice water in my eyes. My bathing suit reeked afterwards. I'm not sure I'd want to eat them anyway considering what the water's like. By this time it was after four in the afternoon so we finally went off to cut bamboo. Owen and I chipped in but we still didn't finish loading it
all up until just after the sun set.That posed a big problem -the river is full of rocks and it's hard to navigate a boat even in daylight. We slowly crawled along back through the shallow water but there really wasn't a way to spot the submerged rocks. At one point, the pilot unloaded us on an island to make the boat lighter and we walked 2km by moonlight to meet him at the other end. When we got there, he'd beaten us easily and had been throwing back still more lao lao for a good twenty minutes. I finally got back to the guesthouse just after 8. One of the friends gave Owen and I coconuts as thanks and I did real botch job of trying to open the damn thing up. It didn't even taste good so I gave it to the guesthouse monkey and he yelled at me.
Thus ended my Laos experience. Zoo and I had maxed out our visa and we had to head across the border to Cambodia. The border crossing was fairly painless if a little surreal. It's a rural area and only recently became an official crossing, but the road to the border turns into such a tiny dirt road that you'd think there's no way it could be right. After getting stamped out of Laos, we walked a few hundred meters through the woods to the Cambodian checkpoint. All around, fires were smoldering in the woods making it smokey and bleak. Welcome to Cambodia.At the checkpoint where you can get a visa, there was a young Korean woman throwing the worst little hissy fit. She kept whining to the head official, asking him why he wouldn't let her into the country. After a while, he got so irritated, they simply booted her out of the country. We'd missed the beginning of all this but the official explained she had been refusing to pay the $21 dollars he asked for instead of the $20 she thought it would be. If she was short a dollar, there were countless people around who would have happily given her the dollar if she'd asked politely -or maybe just to shut her up if we'd known the problem. If she thought he was being corrupt, you'd think she'd bite her tongue once it was clear he wasn't going to relent. But apparently she wasn't smart enough for either option. I hate to generalize, but let's just say that I wasn't too surprised when I saw her Korean passport.
Our van took us all the way to the small city of Stung Treng, where Zoo and I said goodbye -probably the last time I'll see her for another year or two. She stayed there, planning to head east, while I continued on south to Kratie. On the way, I finally had a chance to go see some of the last remaining Irrawaddy dolphins that I'd missed in Laos. I didn't get a single decent picture because they move so fast, but it was beautiful and we got to see them right up close. Other than that, Kratie was pretty dull.
I stayed with a French guy who I'd been with on the bus from Stung Treng and we ended up on the same bus going south the next day. The first thing this guy did upon waking up was roll a joint. We went for breakfast together, which he followed with another joint.
We hopped on the bus -sitting in the aisle again- at around eight but we made it only a few kilometers before it broke down. Charlie's reaction was to wander off and smoke up again. So we waited there under a tamarind tree for a while and then another bus showed up. Thinking we'd be off soon, I got excited and hauled my things to the new bus. Unfortunately, this bus didn't work either. Two teams of guys worked simultaneously on both engines to create one working Frankenbus out of the two junkers. A few hours later, they got it going.While we were moving, it was a pretty nice ride. They had an old movie playing on the TV that was kind of like a 70s Thai version of I Love Lucy goes to a beauty pageant, all poorly dubbed into Khmer. When that was over, they put on a VCD featuring the Khmer cover of "My Humps" as sung by a Khmer girl whose titular attributes were notably modest and a guy well into his 50s.
Frankenbus got us to withing a few kilometers of Kompong Cham before again dying. That was cause for still another joint. Again we waited by the road until someone showed up on a moto to fix it. All told, it took us eight hours to finish the supposedly three hour journey. At least the road was paved though.
Well, that only gets me to Kompong Cham and I'm well past that now, but it's long enough already. I didn't even get to the moto trip in the title. I'll write more in a few days. Too sleepy and hungry right now.
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