Onions and Spare Tires: Overland from Vietnam to Laos

By Erin Kollings

26 hours on a bus. And we made good time- only two flat tires, eight sick people and twenty-four stops to pick up goods which would share our journey across the border. From Hoi An, Vietnam to Vientiane, Laos overland.

Green sweeping hills, limestone mountains, spanning coastlines, decaying French colonial houses in bright pastels. Inside the bus it smells like onions and sweat. Next to me I see boxes of lightbulbs, bags of clothes, crates of food and crammed between it all – the passengers. My fellow seatmate is a youngish Vietnamese woman crossing into Laos for work. She has long black hair and is averse to windy roads. This road is windy. Very windy. She spends half of the journey bending over me and throwing up in small plastic bags and then chucking them out the window. When she misses the bag and hits me with her sickness, I move and sit next to a boy wearing a Nike shirt. He wants to practice his English and tells me I look like Paris Hilton. I move again. The actual crossing is at very high elevation- it is rainy and cold. At the border passengers spill out of the bus, weaving through the extra baggage to stand in the long line to get their passports stamped. Currency is changed, colds are caught and we lumber back into the bus for the second part of our journey.

The bus careens on and I watch, picking up small seconds of people’s lives on the other side of the window- picking rice, holding a child, pumping air into the a bike tire. In the 22nd hour I can no longer stand the stench or the heat in the back of the bus. Disregarding cultural taboos I crawl up to the front and squeeze in next to the bus driver’s posse. Here the door is open, and there is air- real air! Five men take turns driving, text messaging, smoking, downing Laos coffee, chatting and laughing. They give me strange looks and whisper for a few seconds on my arrival- but I am soon forgotten.

We are less than 2 hours away when a tire decides to pop. Everyone unloads.
Ahhh, the beauty of travel.