Day 23 - I Didn't Know that Rednecks Traveled

Savankhet is a very pretty is very quiet town. At night a lot of the streets didn't even have lights which gave the whole town a very sleepy feel. In a city that was supposed to be the second or third largest in the country there was no building more than three stories tall. In the morning we found out that buses left all day for the capitol, which was somewhere between a seven and eleven hour ride north. I was feeling a little under the weather with a cold or something that bothered me on and off for the rest of the trip. Actually I was glad I wasn't in China when I got sick since I just end up thinking that it was bird flu. Getting some strange illness that they talk about on TV is not something I usually have to worry about in the US. We got over to the bus station and got tickets for the 9:30 bus which gave us about 45 minutes to hang out at the station. I was writing in my journal when I saw two other Americans walk by. One of them sat down next to us and immediately asked if we, "wanted to smoke?" Now the younger people reading my blog will already know that he wasn't talking about a cigarette, and of course he happened to be wearing a wacky tobbacy t-shirt. I turned down the offer of drugs in a country whose legal system I didn't understand. We exchanged the usual traveler pleasantries of where are you form where are you going. He and his friend were from Houston and were headed to a town North of where we were going known for its tubing and its partying.

I mostly ignored him and went back to writing stopping to ask Dave what day we had seen Obama's speech on. The guy from Houston immediately cut in with, "You don't like that nigger, do you?" The three of us were so stunned at hearing someone just so quickly drop the N word that we just sat there for a second until someone asked him if he was serious. He said something about there never being a good black president and that we, I assume here he ment white people, should have our own president. He said all this while using the N word maybe five more times. Dave, who had just finished a book on the civil war, added something like you already tried that once and lost. What was really amazing was that he seemed stunned that we could possibly like Obama. His friend came over and dropped the N word about eight more times in a few sentences. It seemed so over the top that I thought that they had to be joking, but they seemed perfectly serious. By this point we were all just saying that this was horrible, but they kept right on at it until their bus was called. I'm still not 100% sure that they were serious. I know there are people who think like that I just didn't think that they traveled. What's some one that racist doing in a mellow little country like Laos, Hell, what are they doing being surrounded by foreign people.

Our bus for Vientiane, the capitol, left not long after. At first it was pretty empty, but within one or two quick stops it was more than full. The bus was very crowded. The was so little space overhead that I had to sit pretty much with my feet on my bag. The seats were also thin enough that I couldn't avoid resting against Dave. The bus was full pretty fast, which meant that even though the trip was about eight hours there were people sitting on little plastic seats in the isle the whole way. The people on the seats didn't seem to mind too much. I saw whole families leaning together on the seats so they could rest without falling over. There were a few quick stops for some people to go to the bathroom or where you could rush off and get some food, but it only stopped briefly. I wasn't feeling well so I didn't eat much. People would come up to the windows selling all manner of food. They had strange fruits, eggs, corn on the cob, and some sort of dried fruit like thing that I had some of which tasted vaguely of banana. The woman sitting next to Ken was wearing heavy woolen clothing despite the fact it was so warm I was sweating in my shorts and t-shirt. Ken said that the wool rubbed up against him the whole way.

He didn't really like her until she offered him some of her corn on the cob. The bus was hot and sticky the whole way and even after Dave managed to partially close the blind on the window, which came mostly at the expense of the person sitting in front of us, it was jsut too hot. Since the blind was closed I also didn't see much the whole way besides the occasional tree and red ground. We were on what was supposed to be the main highway for the whole country but we still ended up on unpaved roads for long stretches. People got on and off the bus so that for most of the ride there were only a couple of people in the isle. One little boy slept for a while laying across two of the stools. It was late in the day by the time we got off at Vientiane and by that time the bus also reeked. We were all pretty tired so we just went to eat at some Thai place and went to bed.