Muang Ngoy Neua

07/11/12 - Muang Ngoy Neua was a peaceful riverside village, only reachable by boat.  We checked into a riverside shack with hammocks and a great view of the river and the surrounding karst cliffs.  After our gruelling trek, it was nice to spend a day relaxing and getting our energy back.  We also awaited news of the US election as we were without internet (and electricity except for 3hrs per day).  We also discovered some leftover war junk which the locals had used to decorate the village.

09/11/12 - From Muang Ngoy Neua we took a one hour boat to Nong Khiaw where we stayed for the night knowing that a big bus journey was waiting for us the next day. 

 

10/11/12 - We had to take the only bus to Sam Neua which was leaving between 12 and 13h30. We were lucky enough to wait for 1h30, standing near the bridge. The 11hours journey was a nightmare for very different reasons, each one enough in itself (when you think you’ve seen it all). First of all, imagine going from Paris to a ski resort in the Alps in France by car. It can take around 11hours (including stops) but you expect the last 10 or 20 kilometres to be winding. Except that in this case, the ‘road’ is bad and the 11 hours are all on winding roads. On top of that, the minibus was very old and our seats broke, which means we had the choice between sitting at the back (on a 20 centimetres plank of wood with no leg room) or sitting next to another person who takes already a seat and a half, because the seats were only 30 centimetres wide. The icing on the cake was that we stopped 3 times for an express wee on the side of the road for 30 seconds. We finally arrived in Sam Neua at midnight knowing that our bus for Vietnam was 7 hours later (another 11hours + 4h to Hanoi bus journey). We had a short night’s sleep in a guesthouse for 5 hours. At this point we were clandestine in Lao with our visas expired.

After an hour of our bus journey to Vietnam, when we thought that nothing else could go wrong, we saw this…

… a truck with a puncture in the middle of the only road to Vietnam and its owner smoking a big pipe. We did a U-turn to the nearest town Vieng Xai (where the commies hid in secret caves for 9 years while the Americans bombed the ground above) and stayed there for 5 hours, enough time for the truck to sort itself out. Unfortunately, it is never that easy and when we came back to the scene of the crime, nothing had changed (actually, it had : an extra wheel was off the truck).

After another couple of hours (at this point we were thinking we might be stuck in Vieng Xai for 9 years), putting pressure on the driver and the owner of the truck to sort himself out, we moved on again for 2 hours to the Lao-Vietnamese border. It was supposed to be closed at this time, but we woke up the guys working there and went through without paying the extra 10 U$ dollars we expected to pay for staying a day longer on Lao soil.  What we didn’t expect  to happen just metres after the Vietnamese border was to stay overnight sleeping on the bus, as the driver said it was now too late for him to drive.