Muang Sing to Xieng Kok via Muong Long

A dusty bumpy road jars the 20 people jammed into a bus designed for 12 as we grind our way up and down hills on the way to our connection town of Muong Long. The bus suspension is just a memory and I watch with mild alarm as the driver wrestles the bus around pot holes and sharp mountain curves with a quarter turn of play in the steering. The bus plows through rutted roads ankle deep in dust raising a cloud that trails behind as we try to outrun it. The dust is so fine it filters into the bus and at times the cloud is nearly as thick in as out. My white shirt turns progressively deeper shades of beige as I attempt to protect my lungs with my bandana. We wind through once forest clad mountains now cloaked in shrubs and intermingled banana trees. We pass numerous hill tribe villages where I spy some still-traditional dress. Villages are a combination of stilt house of either spit bamboo or teakwood. There is the occasional two story with teak over concrete. The villages are obviously dirt poor but no one seems to be going hungry.


Good farmland provides rice and vegetables and there lots of ducks, chickens, geese and pigs to provide protein. Fish from the river supplements the bounty of the land. Women carry impossible loads in baskets supported by a single strap on their foreheads that goes around the basket on their backs. In the villages hordes of children clad in a variety of dirty and torn clothes wave at the bus as it passes. The women in traditional clothes hurriedly cover their bare breasts at the sound of the bus.

We stop as the shift linkage on the bus falls apart. We have a welcome break from the bouncing and slamming that the road and bus have been dishing out. We have just enough time to stretch our legs and find a bush while the assistant driver repairs the linkage. The diesel of the bus roars to life calling us back to the bush for the last torturous descent to Mouang Long.



Mouang Long
The bus station in Mouang Long is the center of a bustling market that is more appealing than the one in Mouang Sing. While I investigate the next bus to Xieng Kok, Deb wanders the market looking for food. It is difficult to figure out when the bus will leave because no one speaks English. I stand in frustration when the bus engine roars into life with Deb nowhere in sight. I frantically motion at the driver who ignores me. It turns out he is only repositioning the bus so passengers can mount. I signal that I am going to get Deb and he seems to understand. I find her way down in the market and we rush back to find the driver now sitting in the bus station apparently in no hurry to go anywhere. I make eating motions to the driver and he points me to the market. So we chance going to a soup stand that Deb has spotted that is close by enough to keep an eye on the bus.

A young monk pedals for his morning alms rounds

The soup stand is little more than a shack with a charcoal fire, a big vat of boiling broth and an array of noodles meat and vegetables displayed on the table. We motion to the proprietress who is very cheery and starts pointing to the various food items asking what we would like. We select a variety and watch her first rinse our bowls with boiling water then put boiling broth into the bowls. She adds our chosen items which are cooked as we watch in the still bubbling broth . By now we are starving and the soup is delicious. We top it off with an ice cold Lao beer. As we are slurping the last of the soup I see the bus driver head for the bus. It appears that he was kind enough to wait for us to finish eating. I pay the equivalent of $2 and we rush to the bus for what will be the last leg of our journey back to the Mekong.

The road starts out nicely paved and this is a much better bus; less crowded and with actual suspension to absorb the bumps and pot holes that slowly replace the smooth pavement a few kilometers back. After what seems to be a very short hour we arrive in Xieng Kok. The bus drops us at a crossroads but I am unsure what the road crosses because we are at the end of the road in Northwest Laos. The only way out is back down the road we came or down the Mekong river which is our plan. We find a shabby little bungalow to spend the night. After a refreshing cold shower to wash of the road grime, a cold beer and a short nap, I am sitting on our porch watching the mighty Mekong flow past my doorstep. I look across the river to Burma as the afternoon sun tries to burn through the smoke filled sky.


Richard at the end of a long day on the bus