Border crossing to Laos

From Hue we had booked onto a bus to the border and through to Savannakhet in Laos. Border crossings are notorious for scams, stories of being dumped halfway and left or drivers demanding more money to continue are everywhere. So we weren’t really expecting our little story of “yes the bus takes you all the way through” to be completely true but hey you have to just go with what people tell you! Anyway, so we pile into a little mini-van the following morning with another 8 or so people and get to the border without any issues about 3 hours later, get off the bus to go through immigration, pay a few extra dollars here and there to keep border guards happy and to get your Laos stamps without any grief (few dollars over the odds is worth the lack of hassle!)… cool, we are now on Laos soil, new adventure, new country – hang on where is the bus!! No sign of it, ok, looks like the adventure starts now then. We had gained the company of a very nice Laos women who was trying to exchange money with us at extortionate rates, but at least she tells us that there is a small town and a bus station about 2km down the road – so off we trudge in 35 degree heat with backpacks on. 20 mins later we stumble across a rather run down looking bus shelter but thankfully with a bus waiting! It had already loaded up beyond all belief but it’s heading where we need to go so along with boxes of rice, wheelbarrows and bags of god knows what, we pass our backpacks up to the guy on the roof and jump on board. The aisle is stacked high with more boxes and we clamber our way up to the back seats to find yet more boxes, so we end up sitting on tinned sardines and toothbrushes and try to get comfy. Feeling a little like one of the sardines I’m sitting on we start making our slow and bumpy way through the very rural Laos countryside stopping at regular intervals to either distribute stuff from the bus or to take more on (the word full doesn’t exist here!). About 5 hours later and about 3 litres of sweat lost (sitting at the back means sitting above the engine, turning the bus into a sauna) we finally arrive at Savannakhet… we had travelled from the Vietnamese east coast across the border and over to a town on the Mekong in Laos where you can see Thailand on the other side of the river in the space of 10 hours!