Luang Prabang - Udomxai

The 09.30 bus...leaving at 09.12
Sometimes travelling sucks. Today was such a day.

On the whole, the actual travelling part -- the physical ferrying of yourself and all your belongings -- is tedious. The biggest draws of all these planes, trains, and automobile rides is the sense of movement (and I don't mean over potholed roads or through pockets of turbulence). New adventures are coming your way. New experiences and new stimulations. The destination is an exciting, exotic place just a few hours away. Sometimes you might even meet someone interesting on the journey.

None of that happened today.

The bus station in Luang Prabang is a dust-bowl at the edge of town filled with ancient vehicles and crumbling shacks. That's fine. I'm here to catch a bus, not make an in depth comparison with National Express facilities. Except, it turns out that my bus -- the bus in which I reserved a seat less than twenty-four hours ago -- has departed and the next one doesn't leave for three hours. Apparently, when the bus is full it leaves. Sensible, really.

Of course, when the next bus does pull into the station two hours early, churning up clouds of dust that sticks to my sweaty skin, it's best to get onboard. After all, you don't know what time it'll leave. So, crammed onto the bus with everyone else in the midday heat, we waited. And waited. Eventually the driver deemed the bus full enough and we left. To give the people their due, there was a lot of camaraderie between the passenegers, which I was fortunate to share. Pieces of fruit and ice-cream were distributed round and I offered some biscuits in kind.

The journey was very monotonous, the landscape uninteresting. The only energizing part was the thought of the new town. Udomxai. Lonely Planet was particularly brief, leaving the cityscape to my wild imagination. A frontier town, I thought, full of hustlers and backpackers exchanging stories of danger and revelry, before heading out into the badlands or returning to civilization.

How wrong can you get?

Udomxai has to get my personal award for most charmless place I've ever visited. It's a two-dimensional place, having no buildings beyond those which line the main road that passes through. Rotton fruit and cheap electrical good vendors ring the bus yard. Stray dogs and buzzing insects swarm the broken pavements. The buildings it does have are functional, Communist style blocks, built and maintained with no love. I walked up and down the town, looking for life. If I could at least find other backpackers then I'd take a bed in a dorm -- even if the dorm looked like a prisoner's wing. No luck. It seemed everyone else had moved on or checked into private rooms and necked half a dozen sleeping pills to avoid the reality of this hideous place.

A small family run establishment caught my eye and I marked it as my lodgings for the night. The luxury room at $5 sounded just the ticket to leaven my sour mood. Or maybe that was cruel joke for gullible guests. The TV had one Chinese station, the squat toilet was underneath the shower, the A/C was broken, and a foul aroma permeated the air. Nice. When I asked if we could negotiate the price, the owner took out a marker pen and scrawled a number on the wall.

Maybe he was redecorating tomorrow.

I nodded, defeated, and took off my backpack. Inspecting the room I found the source of the smell: a box of rotton eggs in the bedside cabinet. Maybe it was supoosed to be a treat? The biggest thrill of the night -- between eating bad food at a nasty restaurant and checking my threadbare email account -- was dumping those eggs in another room. I went to bed vowing to leave this outpost of hell at the earliest opportunity.

This doesn't do it justice...