Two day journey to Laos

Our bus ride from Sapa began with a chorus of vomiting Vietnamese people behind us, motion sick on the steep and windy mountain roads. Luckily, after a few hours we had to switch buses to go to Dien Bien Phu, where we would spend the night and start the second leg of our journey to Laos. We than took a smaller local bus for the following ten hours. The road was being built as we drove, literally, and the bus had to stop for all sorts of rockslides, landslides, and construction. And not only where they constructing a road, but a dam system on the river we followed for most of the juorney. It was amazing that our bus made it through the muddy rutted roads, where the mud would be as deep as the tires on this little bus. But, we put aside the overcrowded bus, the construction, and the bitchy Canadian girls sitting next to us, and enjoyed the stunning beauty of the northern Vietnamese mountains.

We stayed in Dien Bien Phu, the city where the French were finally defeated by the North Vietnamese in 1954, for about 8 hours. After a nights rest that felt more like a cat nap, we took another grueling bus ride at 5AM. As our small local bus pulled around the bend of the mountain, it jerked to a stop and we were told to get off the bus and walk. Once we started walking, we realized why - a bulldozer was making the road. So after crossing the border by climbing down giant piles of rubble, we got our Laos visas, the bus arrived two hours later after the road had been opened up and we were on our way. We were finally in Laos!

The bus dropped us off in Muong Khua, a small village hugging the banks of the Nam Ou river, where the electricity only comes on between 6 and 10PM, the houses were on wooden stilts, and where ATMs and computers didn't exist (it felt great to escape from all of that, except that we had very little cash at the time...). We met a bunch of travellers headed to Vietnam that gave us some much needed tips about how to wisely use our short time in Laos, tasted Lao Lao (local whisky, famous among travelers in the region, and dirt cheap) for the first time, and swapped stories. Not a bad introduction to the country.