Finally arrived in Vientiane after 48 hours - 2 nights sleeping on the bus, the 2nd of those thinking that I wouldn't reach my 27th because of the rocks that kept falling next to our bus: we were stopped about 5km from the border to Laos in the dark because a landslide had blocked the road ahead of us, and throughout the night we kept hearing the rumble of more and more rocks and earth falling, falling, falling...and to our right there was a significant drop down the mountain into the jungle...
Earlier on we'd already tried a border further south about 3 hours away, but that was closed/they wouldn't let us through, so we drove back to a town near the original border we'd tried, and just stopped there. There was me, 2 Dutch girls and a French guy, about 7 Vietnamese people (none of whom spoke English), and about a tonne of onions - on the roof and in the ack fours rows of seats on the bus. Fragrant.
So the four of us had to work out what was going on through using our phrase books - none of which had any useful phrases in. We sat down for lunch in a place with a huge sign outside saying "com" which we knew meant rice, we asked for rice, and were told "No!" and got noodle soup. We were kind of in the dark about everything. We thought they might take us back to Hanoi, but then we worked out that they probably wouldn't go back because of the onions - they probably had an obligation to deliver these onions to Laos (the onions being more important than us of course).
So we had our noodle soup, and asked via our phrasebooks, "When are we going?" One driver said "five", and the other driver said "tomorrow", so we weren't sure again, if it would be 5pm, 5am, in 5 hours, on the 5th October, or (more likely) something completely different... We met a Kiwi guy who had been waiting in the town all by himself for 24 hours already! So we amused ourselves with card games and the French guy got drunk on rice wine that one of the locals kept forcing on him (and us, but we managed to avoid having more than 2 shots - he had about 20!) Then, we were just finishing our dinner later on of rice (they'd got some by then), and the drivers suddenly jumped into life, "Yo yo!" and beckoning us to go (this was 7 o'clock - 24 hours after leaving Hanoi). So we jumped on the bus and were off to the border again. This time we got a bit further, but a few km along and there'd been another landslide, so the bus just stopped there. We could just see out the window to our right there was a long drop down, and on the left, was the mountian which had partly collapsed just ahead of us. However, the bus didn't/coundn't turn around, so we just had to settle down to sleep there....all through the night we could hear rocks and earth falling down on our left side, right next to the bus, and because we couldn't see anything, we could only imagine how bad it was...if that wasn't enough, one of the passengers decided he couldn't wait any longer and decided to have a late night wank on the bus (it was raining outside after all), another guy stole the dutch girls' biscuits and water, and there was always someone or other smoking on the bus and playing backstreet boys or whatever on their phone - all night long!! The buddha with the flashing lights on at the front of the bus wasn't really watching over us, I don't think. And of course there were no toilets.
Fortunately, by morning, we were still on the bus, on the road, and all alive. The digger started clearing the road finally, and by about 11am we were off to the Lao border with no more probs, apart from all the toilets were locked shut. I was supposed to be going to Louang Prabang, but there was no way I was getting on another bus, or staying on the onion bus, for another who-knows-how-many-hours so here I am in Vientiane finally! And its my birthday today! I'm actually pleased to be 27 now - I could have been squashed under a tonne of onions and rocks at the bottom of the Vietnamese jungle but I have lived to see another birthday, woohoo!
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