Commence The Worst Bus Ride Ever. We got to the bus station in Luang Prabang,
hoping to take the 2 o’clock bus to Vientiane,
which wasn’t running until 5 o’clock. So
we sat around at the bus station for hours in the heat. Then we got on the stifling bus. It was pretty empty when we got on, so we
were hoping to have some room to spread out and get some sleep. Our hopes were quickly dashed as the bus
filled up. In front of us sat a Lao
couple with a baby. The father sat in
front of me. He is remembered in my
journal using choice words that I will not repeat here. This man wanted everything to be perfect for
his bus ride and had very little consideration for anyone else. He had the people across
the aisle close the curtains on their window; he closed his air vent and the
air vent behind him (ours, and yes, it was still stifling); and then he
reclined his seat to its maximum extent, right into my lap. These seats were really close together to
begin with, and I think his must have been broken because of how far into my
space it extended. I asked him to move
his seat up, but instead, he pushed my
seat back, similarly crushing the man in the seat behind me. He sat back down and put his hands behind the
head cushion on the seat, leaving his fingers about two inches from my face. At one point, he even scratched me in the face
with his long fingernails. This all
happened before the bus even left the station.
I knew I wouldn’t be able to bear it, so I asked the man behind me if I
could sit next to him. He was very kind,
though we could only communicate through hand gestures.
The bus ride continued to be awful. A woman across the aisle was vomiting the
whole ride because of motion sickness. Babies
were crying, Thai pop music was blasting, and we made about one million
seemingly unnecessary stops. We picked up
a man with a rifle. Yeah, he just
flagged the bus down from the middle of nowhere, rifle slung across his back,
and got on. (The Lonely Planet guide book said something about watching out for Hmong guerrillas along the route between Vientiane and Luang Prabang.) I was incredibly nervous the
whole ride. I thought something terrible
was going to happen. I guess the worst
thing that happened was that we had to endure the discomfort and windy roads
and everything else for about 12 hours instead of the 8 or 9 hours we were
told. We got into Vientiane at about 5 AM on March 1st. We took a tuk-tuk into town and looked for a
guest house, but couldn’t find one that was open so early, so we ended up
staying in a more expensive hotel. Even
though it was so pricey, we were able to stay for the rest of that morning and
the following night for the price of only one night. Needless to say, we hadn’t slept a wink on the
bus ride, so we slept for a few hours before waking up for breakfast, showers,
and walking around town. After a mango
shake and some noodles, we got on a bus to the Buddha Park.
At the entrance to the Buddha Park
was a spherical, pumpkin-like sculpture with three levels. You could walk inside the open mouth of a giant face and walk up narrow steps to each higher level. At each level was an inner room with Buddhas
and other statues. As I climbed the
levels, I bumped my head on the concrete and then found myself crawling out of
a very narrow passageway to get to the outside. From the top of this structure, however, we
could see the whole park. The sun was
throwing some amazing light on it, and the giant reclining Buddha statue was
most impressive from above.
We walked back down to explore. The place was totally bizarre. It was filled with statues that were pretty
creepy. There was a woman holding a
pinwheel embedded with colored glass. There
were small children pointing at each other and brandishing swords, with a robed
man standing over them, his hands held up as if to say “Stop!” but with a
peaceful expression on his face. There
was a man pulling the leg off a giant cockroach, an elephant standing in a pit
of human heads, a monkey and elephant each bowing to a prince and presenting
him with scrolls. There were two
characters, one on top with the head of a pig, pulling the hair of the one on
the bottom, who was sticking out his tongue. There was a cupid-like character, a prince and
princess holding a serpent, many characters with multiple arms or faces, a
three-headed elephant, an alligator, a man with wings, a prince smiling while
being swallowed by a fish-like serpent (or serpent-like fish?), a man playing a
mandolin.
For some reason, one of my favorites was of a giant standing Buddha-like character,
but he had the face of a troll, shoes with teeth, and he was carrying a dead
woman who was much smaller than he. Another
one was of a man who appeared to have a snake growing out of the top of his
head, and he was sawing it off. And
interspersed throughout the weirdness of this park were totally normal Buddhas,
to which people had made offerings of flowers and candles and incense. I sat in the park, drawing and writing and
snapping pictures as the sun shed light all over the crazy statues.
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