good MORNING VIETNAM.

well, we're finally in vietnam, hue to be exact. 30 hours on a bus. oh, do i have stories for you.

boxing day morning i was feeling ancy - time to move on. so i got up early, picked us up two tickets to hue. "hanoi!" he kept saying. no, i said, HUE. hue. it's the same in vietnamese and english, and it's a decent sized town. "hanoi!" he said again. uh oh.

on my way i ran into the borderline retarded canadian girl - she's harmless enough but really, really naive. anyway, she was freaking out a bit about her travel plans, so i hung out with her for a bit then watched some friends. yeah, shut up. it's a good show. apparently every hour of every day, every episode of friends is playing somewhere. a little bit of trivia i picked up on this trip.

so we got on our bus to vientiene, arrived 4 very uncomfortable hours later (they have these VIP busses, it's so funny that they're called VIP. the only difference between those and local busses is that they're not crammed to the hilt with laos people, just westerners) and had to find this travel agent. why? i have no idea. the laos are not good organizers, i have since learned. so we hauled ass with our giant backpacks desperately searching for the travel agent, and when we found it - guess who was there. nick and debs! yay! and jo too, who we hadn't said goodbye to. so, we got into a big songthaew and headed to the bus station.

when we got to the bus station, there was a line of busses. we went to go on the one that said "hue", because, well, that's where we're going, and they said "nonono, you go on this one to hanoi." i said "but we're going to HUE. not hanoi. opposite directions." "you switch at the border" he says. okey dokey, more time with nick and debs, hooray!

so we hopped on the bus, at it appeared we were all going to have our own seats, which is awesome because it's an overnight bus. but no, some socially inept french guy chose to sit next to shea rather than take the 5 empty seats at the back, so i gave up my seat for him so she could have her own (she was feeling the pain of 5 days in vang vieng.) and took the back seats. great! 5 empty seats. i can lay across them and sleep!

no.

3 laos guys got on and took up 3 of them. from then on i sprawled across the other two and feigned sleep. oh, did i mention they don't recline? i figured if i can't even be in a reclining seat, i was going to at least be able to put my feet up.

wrong again.

apparently the laos bus people hate foreigners. seriously - hate them. they were such assholes, they were going up and down aisles, ripping blankets from people's legs that were even remotely touching the floor, and giving the hairy eyeball to everyone with their feet up. shea even got her legs slapped by the woman we now call "blanket bitch/ticket bitch". more on that later.

so as i've mentioned, the roads in laos were made by drunken ox and toilet paper. it's no wonder it takes 2 hours to go 80 kms. i'm kind of glad it was night time and i couldn't see the road, to tell you the truth. and we couldn't really sleep, because as soon as we got going, they turned on TV and started playing a series of 70s disco videos. ra ra, rasputin. they cranked it when we asked them to turn it down - oh yes, these people definitely did not like foreigners.

finally the video ended, and he put on some laos book on tape (loud again). i took an extra dose of travel pill to knock me out. we stopped at one point so ticket/blanket bitch could get out and light incense and make an offering to buddah at a little temple on the road. it was probably to pray that we didn't fall off of a cliff. at one point i woke up because i didn't feel we were on solid ground. we weren't - we were on this rickity wooden one lane bridge over a giant gorge that i swear to you was swaying. more drugs were necessary here. thank god for gravol.

we stopped for dinner at hands down the sketchiest place yet. you were randomly served with however many fingers you put up - i was referring to three people, i got this stirfry thing. shea put up one finger to get attention, got cold chicken and rice. we didn't dare eat the meat, so our dinner was basically rice. we got back on the bus and drove for a while, then stopped. for 4 hours. it was like a sleepover with 50 of your least close friends, minus the prank calls and pillow fights. the laos guy beside me decided at 2:30 am he wanted to listen to music on his mobile, so he cranked some shitty thai pop until this british guy (who i call "the hobbit", because that's what he was) told him to shut the hell up.

at about 6:30 we started up again, and surprisingly, given that i was on a hard seat that didn't recline and had a bolt in the wall right where my head rested, i felt pretty well rested. we got to the border, and the fun began.

we're not even entirely sure which border we came across, but it was the least fun border crossing i've had - ever. we waited for 2 hours on the laos side until all the laos had gone through, then and only then would they process the foreigners. then, we walked across to the vietnam side, where we again had to wait for all the vietnamese to go through. seriously - they'd be in the middle of doing a foreigner, and a stack of vietnamese would come through, and they'd put it away and process all of those. then the power went out, and they all sat back with their hands behind their heads hanging out. it was surreal. the best was this one border guy said to debs "where you from" on a note. she wrote "england" and he wrote back "i love you." she wrote back "i love you too. hurry up."

when we got to the other side, we had to search for our bus. they all look the same - but we had the ticket/blanket bitch. so we were told we had to switch busses at the border. well, we're at the border. so there are 6 of us that need to switch. we're explaining this to our driver and he says "ok. hue. ok. HANOI!" big smile. no, i said. HUE. DANANG. south. hanoi - north. finally we did it via charades - nick has some great pictures he liked to show in succession of my arms moving - it looks like i'm doing the YMCA. finally we got something like we'll switch in vinh. here's to hoping.

we hopped back on the bus and drove the 3 hours (for 96 kms) to vinh. we had a breakfast stop and those of us switching were kicked off the bus. we said our goodbyes (again) and asked the ticket bitch for our tickets so we could show we've paid for hue (danang for the others). she refused. flat assed refused to give us our tickets. this is when we knew we were getting screwed over. this guy came over and said to us "no no, on good faith, on good faith. the bus come, the man come out and tell them you pay already. no money, no tickets." but here's the kicker: "if you have to pay ten dolla, it's ok - it's only ten dolla". bastards.

so, we stood on the side of the fricking highway while these vietnamese boys tried flagging us a bus. not a tourist bus that we paid $10 each to get on - no. a local bus. as local as it gets. so we get on one, put down our bags, and ten minutes later, they start trying to collect money. we argued that no, we'd paid and refused, he wanted $10. then he said it was for our bags. oh jesus. finally, we said screw it, we'd just hold onto our bags. lots of fun when your bag weighs 70 pounds. the guy was such a bastard, if it was even remotely in the aisle he'd come by and shove it over - basically trying to make it so painful we'd pay the $10. i was stuck at the back next to this old guy, who was quite nice, and next to this young couple. the young guy was our champion and made it so we could store our bags in the aisle. then, he was my bestest friend.

i showed him my lonely planet, and he practiced the english words and i practiced the vietnamese words. i was sad i didn't have the vietnamese phrase book, because the beauty of vietnamese is that the letters are english letters so you can actually read them. but he asked me how much my book was, how tall i was, how old i was, i asked him if that was his girlfriend (he said no then she smacked him, then he said yes.) it was good entertainment. i let them listen to my mp3 player for a bit, and he really liked it. he tried telling me something then, either that he thought tegan and sara were awesome despite what amber thinks, or he wanted me to give him my mp3 player. i think it may have been the latter.

vietnam is really beautiful - the buildings are beautiful, the landscape is stunning - so developed though. my conservation heart was a little broken by the massive intensive agriculture and development (wow, i kind of sound like i'm at work right now). so little forest remains, it's all just rice paddies and buildings. the people just don't understand what an ecological gem they have - there's such opportunity for some environmental education here, it would be a really interesting masters thesis to compare SE asia countries and development - laos is pushing for sustainability (which is why i love it so much) and vietnam is basically develop, develop, develop.

but anyway, the bus ride was so sketchy. seriously - the driving here is insane. there are no real lanes, the horn is the defensive driving mechanism, and i swear the drivers have a death wish. here is where shea and i really diverge - she was terrified for her life and was not a fan of the drive - she had to read or sleep. i decided that i'd try to see what interesting things were on the road as a diversion to watching my impending death. i saw so many cows, a few dogs (r.i.p. for one dog), so many motorcycles carring bizarre things - a pig in a basket, 3 people on one, a pile of beams - the bus comes up behind and just blares its horns and they move over. it got pretty terrifying at night, when people chose yay or nay for headlights. i distracted myself by having a rousing game of peek a boo with the baby in front of me, until she was too loud and we got in trouble. whoops.

so the closer we got to hue, the clearer it became that we were not likely to be dropped off at any bus station. sure enough, we were kicked off on the side of the road with our bags. 13 km from hue. shit.

lucky for us (note extreme sarcasm here) there was a moto waiting. a what? a honda hug. oh yeah - just you, a guy, a motorbike and your backpack. we negotiated from $10 to $5 each to take us into hue, then we both hopped on the backs of a motorcycle and began a terrifying 15 minute trek into hue. holy mother of god, there is nothing scarier than being on the back of a motorbike with an extra 70 pounds holding onto a guy who weighs as much as your right leg. i just kept repeating in my best elmer fudd voice "be vewwy vewwy still." and reminding myself that he doest his all the time. we pulled up beside shea and her face was the funniest thing i've ever seen - i got the giggles big time. she was NOT a happy camper. i was just starting to relax when a guy on the motorbike in front of us wiped out, and we nearly crashed trying to avoid him on the road.

be vewwy, vewwy still.

so, we got into hue, 32 hours after we started this journey, with the sorest asses ever, and found us a hotel room - we splurged on a $30/night place, and am i ever glad we did. we then went out for a nice dinner - fish and shrimp baby - to spoil ourselves, since we'd eaten nothing but rice and crackers for 24 hours.

you know what i find the most interesting? as a kid, i was such a puker. mom, you remember having to wash my hair at many gas stations from having my head out the window throwing up, and dax, you certainly remember being the target sometimes. as an adult, i also have the tendency to feel sick on windy roads. i've been surprisingly ok on this trip - even with 5 vietnamese men smoking all around me on a bus. the roads here put the windy pine pass to shame - yet i don't feel sick. goes to show you how mind rules over matter - i'm so distracted by the experience i forget to feel sick. i saw these people with the bracelets on (i threw up on mine the one time i tried them, in a fixed wing airplane. remember that stalberg?), the ear patch (ditto. damn fixed wings.), and i felt ok. it was so weird. touch wood.

so here you go - this trip is finally turning from a vacation into an adventure, and that's just perfect. this is the stuff good stories and memories are made of.

love and vietnamese kisses,
tasha.