Laotian Bus Ride

6 AM Tuk-Tuk, a motorcycle converted to a taxi, to the bus station in Luang Prabang for the 9 am bus.  Buy a ticket, use the squat toilet for 2000 kip, and battle your way onto the bus.  No open seats.  Not even close.  Try to determine where exactly seats 37 and 38 are at, if they exist at all.  It hits me at about seat 16 that there is no way there is 38 seats on this old bus.  Looks like we will be riding on the roof rack with the luggage and a couple of motorcycles for good measure.  Most Americans complain about economy class and stare into business class with envy.  We’ll be staring down from “subsistence farmer peasant class” to the people sitting in economy. Oh wait! The attendant has just bounced some riff-raff with no tickets at the very back of the bus.  Just behind the stack of chicken coops, seats 37 and 38!  A rooster crows as we take our seats, whew!  “Kop Jai Lai Lai”.  Thank you very much.  The bus departs after another round of loading and unloading the roof rack and the some 40 odd seats.  5 minutes later stop at the gas station for half an hour.  And off we go again.  I fire up my portable music player (thanks technology) to listen to a book on tape.  “City of Light” by David Benioff read by Ron Perlman (think the boss on “Sons of Anarchy”).  Thanks to Jesse Warwick!  The graphic descriptions of the Siege of Leningrad during WWII will help me get through the ride without feeling too bad for myself.  And then the logging trucks and dust begins!  Laos has a lot of trees (especially valuable teak and rosewood) and Asia wants them.  Looks like Asia wants a lot of them.  I thank the environmental groups that shut down logging in the US as I pull my shirt over my face.  I’m glad that I was raised in Idaho, with lots of logging trucks and dust and winding roads.  Otherwise I would be like the rest of the bus by now,  puking and crying.  But I hold up pretty well, at least until we hit the unfinished bridge and see the ferry sitting on the banks of the fast moving Mekong River.  As the soviet era ferry shakes and smokes to heave us across the last stretch, I think to myself “hopefully we’ll float down the next section of the Mekong".   Oh, and bye the way, the Elephant Conservation Center was worth the trip!