» When were you last really scared?

The Death Bus
A few years ago I was travelling around South-East Asia, and found myself in a place called Loang Phrobhang in Lao. For anyone who's ever been there, you will know that Lao is still a pretty lawless country on the whole.

Anyway, we decided to travel to the Capital of Vientiane, and were given two options:
1) Fly on a 30 year old plane with Lao Airlines (The foreign office website advises against this - as their safety record is, shall we say, less than perfect)
2) Get on a bus through the mountains for an eight hour journey through some of the main militia strongholds, where tourists are often stopped, robbed, and shot by various different groups of nasty men.

In the end, we decided to use the bus, as we thought that we could at least bribe the nasty men into letting us live - as opposed to the plane option, where we would have no control over our impending death.

We paid a dollar extra each, and were told that we would get an armed guard to protect us on the bus. Brilliant, safety was certain, or so we thought....

What we actually got on the bus was a 12-year old local Lao boy, with an AK47 strapped to his back, and a look of fear in his eyes.

On route we passed several abandoned buses with the windows shot out, lots of local men standing by the road waving their guns in the air - and last, but not least - a crazy glass eyed driver, who could barely navigate up and down the muddy mountain roads, so it felt like we could drop off the mountain to our deaths at any second.

Needless to say - it was the longest 8 hours of my entire life - but at least I lived to tell the tale.

Still to this day, talk of the death bus sends a shiver though my spine.
Beautiful country though.
(Tue 27th Feb 2007, 12:58, More)