Death of a bus

Pork buns, breakfast of champions.

Bus with a view.

If we bang on it long enough, it will all magically work out.

Tasty side-of-the-road snacks.

Mountain pattern baldness.

LUANG PRABANG, Laos - If you're in a rush traveling through Laos, chances are your head is about to explode. There's also a good chance your bus engine will follow suit.

I read all the warnings about how slow the road is in Laos, made a point of making no firm plans on no firm date, and boarded a bus last serviced during The Secret War, before it was hit by a cluster bomb. As the flatlands of Ventiane gave way the sparsely populated mountains of the north, we crawled by karst limestone cliffs, verdant jungle, and terraced rice paddies. As we creaked up and around each hairpin curve, I was mesmerized by the view, finding it hard to complain about the slow pace. As I stared dreamily out the window, the boy next to me vomited into a plastic bag.

There are few people in Laos (less than seven million), a country about the same size as neighboring Vietnam, which has a population more than 10 times as big. As we drove through the mountains, the jungle was only occasionally interrupted by a clutch of thatch-roof huts and a vegetable stand here and there. At one point a massive gray snake crossed the road, slithering by in time and disappearing into an unruly tangle of green.

The country does have a bit of a mountain pattern baldness problem, though, with the lush greenery broken up here and there by large patches of brown covered by a blackened, stumpy stubble, the legacy of slash and burn agriculture.

To give us an even better appreciation of the surroundings, something important under the bus melted down about three hours into an 11-hour journey. We pulled over in a tiny village perched high on a mountain and I watched as the attendants raised the bus using a jack that looked about the right size for a Mini and an assortment of oddly-sized pieces of wood. They then very bravely got under the bus to stridently and pointlessly bang away on the undercarriage with a sledgehammer.

I watched chickens and pigs run back and forth noisily, admired the view, and reveled in the fact that I had nowhere to be. The locals pointed and smiled at the only western passenger and we made the most basic small talk in gestures and their very limited English.

An hour later we all pretended the bus was fixed, got back on and headed back into the mountains, bouncing over the cratered road and breaking down again as we hit a junction in a town about 30 minutes away. Fortunately there was a food market, so we all got a snack, many of the Laos chowing down on fertilised duck eggs.

Back on the road again, we made it an astonishing one hour before I heard the ping of metal on concrete and felt a sickening wobble from the back right wheel. We came to an abrupt halt in the middle of nowhere, just after a hairpin curve, but fortunately my legs were already crushed against the seat in front of me, so I avoided smashing my face when the driver slammed on the brakes. One of the attendants went sprinting up the road, returning with a sheepish grin and a piece of the axle in his hand.

Finally, they declared the bus dead and another one came to rescue us, taking us the rest of the way to the sleepy, colonial town of Luang Prabang without further incident.