I Was Right!

I hate to admit it, but I was right. Dead right.

The bus from Vientiane to Kunming was miserable. It was about 40 hours over two nights. They call it a "sleeper" bus. I doubt if anyone got a wink of sleep at night.

Bunks are thin and short. Maybe tiny Asians can fit in them, but I can't. At night, it got cold, and condensation built up on the window, which I had to lie against, and a draft came in, despite the windows being as closed as possible.

Besides being cramped, my blanket, though thick and heavy enough, was both too short and too thin for the bunk that was cramming me anyway. The D-shaped railing on the side was necessary to keep me from rolling out of my second tier bunk on the switchbacks all through the Lao hills, but it also was supremely uncomfortable to keep rolling into.

Plus the roads were bumpy, windy, and often just short stretches of dirt.

The good news is that napping was not only possible but almost mandatory during the day. I was so exhausted from tossing and turning in vain to find a comfy position that I did have a couple decent naps.

We stopped to piss in the woods now and then, and food was taken care of at roadside restaurants that served Chinese slop under a cement roof. I've eaten worse though. After crossing into China, we stopped in the sunny and clean border town of Mohan and I ate breakfast with two teachers from Ireland, and a Malaysian guy on business or on holiday. He never cleared up his ambiguity. One Irish guy went into the restroom and came back declaring it "top 5 worst bathrooms, easy." And this is after two years in China and a 6 week holiday through SE Asia.

The claim stood until dinner time at a low dim feeding hall, when he called the former top 5 worst bathroom "Disneyland" compared to the cement shit-trough that passed as a toilet.

It was a quality operation, this transport. We took the small windy roads in China to avoid paying toll fees on the smooth highways, and we sat at a gas station outside of Kunming for 3 hours to avoid getting in at an ungodly early morning hour. When we finally got moving, we got in at 5:30AM.