We woke up to the rain pattering on the balcony of our ‘bungalow’.
We had about 4 hours of drive ahead of use before heading into Vietnam. This allowed us to laze around at the breakfast area. The ambient sound changed in the morning with wind carrying the children’s voice playing around in the nearby village, probably the village the militia men retired to and invited us to visit last evening. For the morning chores of collecting clean water, a couple of villagers were canoeing from our side of the river bank to the spring water source on the other side.
We chit chat with the facility manager, a Thai lady with a unique style of speaking. She almost had a robot like delivery of sentences, with a monotonous cadence no matter the range of the topic – her impression of Lao people, Lao’s dependence on Thai for produce, about the owner of the place, her life style, and even sharing some jokes. After the prolonged breakfast, and amidst the downpour, we managed to load our luggage onto the vehicle, and off we headed to Vietnam
We took off around noon. Just as the rain stopped, the fog lingered on as we drove through the mountain range. The surrounding looking pristine after the recent wash by the downpour. The road from the resort was a single lane flanked by farm lands on either side, with occasional sight of humans herding ducks. Once we got out of this stretch of single lane, we hit the mountains leading to the border towards Cha Lo Landport in Vietnam. Like Myanmar and Thailand, Vietnam mandates that a guide accompanies the Overlanders. Our casual day was jolted when the guide waiting on the Vietnam border called to warn that the border closes at 1700 and that there is a huge backlog of trucks waiting in Laos to cross into Vietnam. Lo and behold, about 10 miles before the border, we hit a long stretch of trucks ahead of us. We couldn’t afford to miss entering Vietnam as we had a reservation for caving the next day, one that gets booked months in advance!
By the very nature of narrow mountain roads, the long trucks took more than their share of the road especially at turns when they have to park/wait at an angle to not roll over to the steep valley. The truckers seem relaxed and in a lot of cases managing the traffic by guiding both the incoming traffic and the overtaking vehicles like ours. It was a common sight to see the ‘Asian shirt roll’ where men ventillate their upper body by rolling the t-shirts over their belly, must be a relief from high humidity and the scorching sun. To counter the blind spots of driving a left hand wheel drive on the right side of the road, Faris was the navigator giving commands as when to overtake. On a number of turns and road construction patches, Faris had to step out and guide us through the balancing act of crossing narrow paths! The Fortuner managed to gracefully extricate out of off track dirt roads. There was also discipline among the truckers as they were all lined up on one side and not overtaking each other. As there wasn’t much of incoming traffic, we were able to to get past the trucks at a reasonable pace.
We got stamped, including on the Carnet for the vehicle, and managed to cross into Vietnam border at the nick of the time. Our agent, Win, picked us and took us to the immigration. We were held for about an hour going through a number of questions. In anticipation of this red-tapism, Win had over-prepared a number of documents from various sources – ministry of transportation, Indian consulate, local license plate, etc.. Judging by the body language, the immigration officer was part demonstrating his ‘sternness’ and ‘thoroughness’ like one would portray villains and bad guys in a poorly made B class movies. Past immigration, the customs guys were more intrigued by how we made it this far from India. After a couple of hours drive, while getting to know more about Win, we reached Phong Na – a town in North Central Vietnam with the world’s largest network of caves
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