Back to the future...
Trip Start
Jan 16, 2012
1
51
92
Trip End
Jan 01, 2014
Ubon Ratchathani, Thailand
Sunday, May 13, 2012
We located Pakse bus station easily enough - down what I would imagine is the worst access road to any bus station in the world as it was just a bumpy mud bath. We bought our ticket for the international bus which would return us to Thailand and sought out some food. This entailed walking through a market primarily selling food, all of which was fly covered and looked and smelled so unappealing that I was convinced we could get chronically ill just by breathing in the fetid air. Once we had safely negotiated death market, we opted for the first “restaurant” we found, which looked basic but promisingly busy. The fact that there were no menus did not deter us and we opted for two chicken soups. It was without question the worst meal we had eaten in Laos (and possibly at all, including snake and goat) as we were served with two bowls of dark brown liquid (of a colour and consistency to which I had become all too accustomed in recent days) containing in its murky depths some barely edible noodles and chicken feet/bones (some of these looked suspicious large for a chicken). We ate what we could of this filth before returning to the bus station and boarding the full coach.
The Laos/Thai border was only around an hour away and the border crossing was relatively painless, although there was the obligatory “exit fee” (tip for border official) to pay to leave Laos before we headed through an underground tunnel which took us to the Thai entry point. The contrast between the relative fortunes of the two countries was already evident at this point as the Thai border control was a swanky affair, where fingerprint scans and photographs of each entrant were taken, whereas entry and exit to Laos had been via innocuous/tatty looking buildings. It became all the more apparent when we switched back to the left hand side of the road (after seven weeks of right hand driving) to a smooth asphalt road which was incomparable to the bumpy, dusty unsealed roads of Laos. The differences are not really surprising as, whilst Thailand has been welcoming hundreds of thousands of tourists for decades and has a reasonably well developed economy, Laos is one of the twenty poorest countries in the world and still has a huge problem with unexploded bombs throughout the eastern side of the country, a legacy of the US war. In addition, it is actually the future in Thailand as the official calendar year here is 2555 - I can report that, as predicted by the future gazers Busted, not much has changed here in the future; in particular, and disappointingly, there are no hover boards nor do people live underwater, although I did meet a man who was just a floating head in a jar who could communicate through thought alone…
Despite our arrival back into civilization, the scene at the bus station in Ubon Ratchathani can hardly be described as civilized as we were immediately pounced upon by various touts trying to lure us onto overnight buses heading to Bangkok. I had promised Shelley a luxurious overnight sleeper train so we politely declined, especially when we saw that the seats did not fully recline (not great for a 12 hour journey) and there was a full on disco, including disco ball, downstairs on the bus. We were cutting things fairly tight to catch the last train to Bangkok as it left around 40 minutes after our arrival. We hopped into a tuk-tuk and exchanged nervous glances as the transfer seemed to take an eternity - thankfully we arrived with ten minutes to despair. However, the news as the ticket booth was not at all good as we were told that - it being a Sunday - all of the sleeper tickets (first and second) had selfishly been purchased by locals so we were consigned to third class travel. The outside of the third class carriages told Shelley everything she needed to know about the comfort levels within and, sure enough, the carriage looked like a 50 year old cattle car, with a few hard school benches introduced for passengers. There were fans on the ceiling, together with bright electric lights, although the former did not work well and every single window had to be opened to provide any comfort whatsoever. The train’s departure was delayed more than 30 minutes beyond scheduled time (timetables are really just aspirational rather than definitive in SE Asia) and all of this time was spent with me playing a diplomatic role of trying to persuade Shelley to stay on the train, which was now our only option for getting back to Bangkok the following morning. Somehow I managed this with skill of negotiation which would now equip me to sit at the table in Brussels and salvage the Euro. Or not...
