Just as I’m starting to get the hang of one country here, my visa is up, and it’s time to move onto the next. I arrived in Thailand a few days ago, via an overnight bus from Luang Prabang. It was a 17 hour ride to Chiang Rai, which surprisingly, wasn’t all that bad. Each seat had adequate space, and everyone received a snack box and a blanket. Whenever I take overnight bus rides, there’s always a few odd minutes in the middle of the night when I wake up, gaze out the window into the darkness, eat a cookie, and wonder how the drivers are staying awake. Those moments have a curious quality of being out of normal time and space. There’s something about driving through landscapes in the middle of the night that obscures any identification with any one place. In those moments, you could be anywhere in the world. Except in Vietnam. I was on one night bus in Vietnam, watching the world go by at some dark, early hour, and there were loads of people on the street. Life there doesn’t seem to observe any notion of night and day, light and dark, or Coordinated Universal Time + 07:00. It just keeps going, 24 hours a day.

One of the most charming aspects about Laos was that there wasn’t a lot to do, in the traditional sense of holiday-making and sight-seeing; museums and other cultural institutions were few, far between, and of moderate size when they did exist. Discovering the country involved simply being in it, being receptive to what it has to offer. One day I was taking a break in the shady courtyard of one of the wats in Vientiane and a monk walked up and started talking to me. Just some pleasantries and standard questions, and then he went on his way, leaving me with a memory of a completely random, interesting encounter. And I have an abiding image in my head from Laos and Cambodia of kids riding bikes. Small kids riding bikes that are way too big for them, standing on the pedals and reaching up for the handlebars because they are too short to sit on the seat. And school kids on bikes. The school kids all wear uniforms of dark trousers or skirts, and white shirts, which they somehow manage to keep spotlessly clean in the hot weather and dirt roads. It’s as if they are protected by a magical detergent bubble. Oftentimes one kid would be pedaling, chauffeuring another sitting on the back rack. Sometimes there would be a group heading down the road together, and sometimes it was just one student, pedaling slowly through the heat. My favorite were the ones who carried a parasol. It makes so much sense, I don’t know why more people don’t do it. I’m going to try doing it when I get home.

Roaming around on a motorbike was really some of the best times I had in Laos (more motorbiking is coming in the next post), but local buses were also a good way to get a solid dose of Lao authenticity. I took one bus between Pakse and Thakhek which took an epic nine hours to go only 350 kilometers. It really shouldn’t have. The guy who sold me my ticket even said something like, “It shouldn’t take nine hours…” But in Laos, yeah, it totally can, despite the road being in mostly good condition, the weather sunny and dry, and the bus mechanically sound. We were just running on Lao time, which has its own set of bewildering rules that I can’t figure out at all, other than to note that it can involve long, inexplicable stops in nonsensical places. For example: we stopped at the main station in Savannakhet for a nice long break, which made sense. What made less sense was another break at another bus station in Savannakhet, located only minutes away from the first. I think we were picking up a family that was moving house, so the bus attendants had to load and secure all their possessions to the top of the bus, including a refrigerator. Why they couldn’t have coordinated this at the first stop is beyond me. Another bus I was on departed mostly on time, turned left onto the main road, and then stopped in front of a bunch of food stands that were more or less directly across the street from the station. I have no idea why. I was even sitting on the right side of the bus, watching out the window, and couldn’t figure it out. We then proceeded to creep a few kilometers down the road – perhaps the bus attendants were browsing all the food stands along the way – before hitting a more reasonable traveling speed about a half hour later. A motor mystery, both then and now.