The special bus

From the "4000 Islands" I had returned to Pakse, a small town in southern Laos. To get back to Vientiane, I chose to take a night bus. Without really knowing what it meant, I booked a "sleeper"... supposedly with beds, and I was curious what this would mean...
When I came to the terminal, I could see the bus already: indeed, it was equipped with beds, fantastic... Then we could enter the bus, and I began to get a strange feeling. I wondered about the stack of alarm-red plastic bags close to the door, but maybe they didn't mean anything. In the bus there were not many choices of what to do: everyone had to lie down immediately. There were upper and lower bunks, but not only one at either side... it was 'window' and 'aisle'. Mine was 'window' and 'upstairs'... the width of the bunks on either side was about 40 or at the most 50 cms, per person. I felt somehow glad about not being to tall and not being equipped with too many kilograms. I was even more happy when the guy who joined me had about the same size...
It seemed that many people took this bus the first time: most of them were looking around with a mixture of confusion, disbelief and - in the end - resignation. We jumped into our beds. The ones on the upper beds could enjoy the loudspeakers, being about 30 or 40 cms above their heads, and the Thai karaoke music that came blaring out of them... fortunately only for about one and a half hours. A stewardess was walking through the bus, handing bottles of water to everyone, but apparently no one opened them... one problem was the simple fact that what gets in, must come out, and this would have meant some trouble, especially for the ones with 'window beds'... the other problem was, that drinking while lying down would have been somehow "uncomfortable", let's call it that way...

So we were swinging through the night... the main roads in Laos are fairly good, fortunately... The entire trip back to Vientiane took about 9 hours, and I was glad when it was over. It wasn't altogether bad or terrible, but spending the whole time lying down, with practically no space to move, isn't too comfortable. And this is saying someone with the body size you all know... anyone larger or heavier must feel tortured after some hours on those buses. I don't know if some of the readers of this post will end up in Laos in the future... be warned! Don't say later that you didn't know...