This was one of the most interesting "travel" days so far. After spending much time trying to find traditional housing and people we saw more on this one day than we have in the last two weeks. We unsuccessfully tried to get information on Nameo, a relatively obscure boarder crossing, a week before. We got our visas ahead of time in Hanoi, as they are not available at this boarder.
The day started at 4:00, with a quick packing session so that we could make it to our 5:30 bus. Once we were on the local materials and supply bus, all the rice was loaded down the center aisle, then the bus ticket taker quoted us the price of $35 each for our ride. We recognized this as the "market" economic system at work. We were western tourists, he wanted to charge us 5 times the normal rate and if we wanted to get to the boarder that day we needed to come to an agreement upon value. By the way the next boarder crossing would have taken us at least another day to get to, and put us in the wrong area of Laos. After threatening to get off, and some minor theatrics on both sides we agreed upon $30 each to get us to the boarder. The bus took off around 6:15, stopped in the next town around 8:00. Then it continued to wind it's way up the hill through some very picturesque country side, past your typical rice fields and your not so typical traditional wooden or bamboo homes. (See picture of boys above) After numerous stops to offload good and some live stock we made it to a small town 60k from the boarder. At this point we were the only two passengers left on the bus and the driver said that they were stopping for lunch, and asked if we would like to join them. When we said that we had food with us, the subject turned to our continued travel to the boarder. Since the bus did "need" to continue to travel the next windy 60k, we were offered a complementary motorbike ride to take us "close" to the boarder. We had to ask how close? He said 10 meters. We agreed, the scooters arrived, Kari tied her helmet on, but at least she had one, and we were off. The scooter drivers picked nice clean lines up the paved but bumpy and sandy road, and within 1.5 hours we were standing at the empty Vietnamese boarder crossing looking for someone who might want to check our passports.
After lunch was over the workers filed back in, it seems like we were the only westerners who had been at this crossing in 8 days... at least that is how many clicks on the date stamp it took before he could stamp our passports. Then after a short walk up the hill we were going through the Laos entry point. The immigration officers were nice enough to let us know that the bus had gone for the day. Hummm...
We hung out at the boarder for an hour and saw no traffic going west except the truck that was hauling bags of concrete that was waiting in customs. We were able to hitch a ride in the back on top of the concrete, so we had a great view of the hills above and the valleys below. After around an hour we stopped, which was good as Kari had to pee, and 20 Laos proceeded to move all 500 bags of concrete from the back of our truck to the back of a flatbed truck that was waiting. For an hour we sat on a grass mat with our driver and other hitch hikers chewing on sugar cane that was kindly offered by our driver. Then we hopped back in the truck for another 2 hours while the sun set on the very traditional villages we passed. You should have seen the surprised looks on the locals faces, it is not often they see Caucasians trafficked in from Vietnam in the back of trucks. The driver dropped us at a fork in the road and pointed to the left for a place to sleep. The driver wouldn't accept the money we offered to him, and we were off to walk in the dark down the road to find our awaiting guest house. Final arrival at guest house approx 9:00pm.
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