Happy Pii Mai, Unhappy Journey

Although I am now in Vietnam. I still want to take the time to talk about the Lao new year. Pii Mai is celebrated in the middle on April every year. In Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia. In Laos it is all about the water. Waterguns, water hoses, and water balloons. We met up with a friend of Christine's from the Peace Corps named Nicole. We just happened to run into her at dinner the night before. We met with some local hostel owners and their friends and proceeded to get drunk and drenched (not in that order, more like continuously one, the other, or both). We were running around like wild monkeys looked for our next victims armed with only a bucket of water and a healthy mischievous nature aided along by copious amounts of Beer Lao. We danced and sang most of the afternoon pausing only to move the party to another location. By the late afternoon we were all partied out and a little pooped. We ate inside of a riverside bungalow on stilts slowly recovering from the days antics. As we were headed home we had the brilliant idea ò stopping at the African tent. Most of the people were from Nigeria or Ghana, but we did get some Fu Fu and it was awesome. If you haven't had it I recommend you to try it. After an eventful day we made it home and prepared ourselves for the 24hr bus ride the next. Little did we know what was in store for us.

We boarded the bus at 7pm and headed for the Laos/Vietnam boarder. It was a normal bus by Laos standards and had "A/C." We arrived at the border at 1:30am. With no explanation the bus parked on the road and shut of the A/C. We all made an effort to just sleep until the border opened, but the bus began to swelter for the heat of over 50 bodies all trying to sleep. No windows = no sleep. One by one we exited the bus and took to sitting in the middle of the road, praying for sunrise. It was very dark and throughout the night more buses came and lined up behind ours. We figured that the border would open at 5am, but at 5am when the purple dawn was approaching and giving us an idea of what surrounded us, we realized we were wrong. The border opened at 6:30am. The guards came out of there house and made there way to the stream to wash themselves and pee. After they returned and lifted the gate our bus let us out at the first check point. We figured it wouldn't take long and like she all the foreigners made a line in front of the visa window on the Laos side. (There are no such things as lines). The drivers from all the buses started collecting passports and taking money. Shoving the piles of hundreds of peoples' passports through the window at the 2 desk clerks. We reluctantly gave ours to someone from our bus and hoped all went well. The system worked and we were sent walking to the Vietnam border. Once we arrived there it was pretty easy, but we had been trying to cross the border for 2 hours already. Over an hour later, we finally got on our way to Hanoi. It was another 10 hours until we arrived in the capital. That is why I never want to take a 24hr bus again.