This isn’t Lao? No, Hue!

Laos is a question mark of a country. With less people in the country than in the city of Saigon, Laos has become famous only for the amount of bombs dropped upon it (most ever in the history of the world) and its opium trade. Interestingly, both exploded during the Vietnam War.

For our extended weekend we decide to make our way up to Laos, without so much as a plan. We book a flight into and out of Hue, the closest large city to Laos, arriving Friday and leaving Wednesday. You would think this would give us plenty of time.

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The hour-long flight to Hue would prove to be short indeed, as my habit of sleeping the moment I sit in a moving vehicle allows a kind of warp-speed. Something only found in Sci-Fi novels and, perhaps, the odd Star Wars movie. Emerging from my cryogenic state upon touchdown, I headed outside to the tarmac only to be greeted by a miraculous turn in weather. Gone was the weight of Saigon smog and humidity.

We leave the airport and search in the darkness for a respectable taxi driver. They crowd around us, wolves to deer, on the hunt for the next dong. The pack shouts out prices for a ride into town, some quite unreasonable, until we bargain down to six dollars. On our way to the taxi, Danny unwittingly provides comic relief:

Danny: Wow look at that executive decision, straight to a cab. Now he’s probably going to rip us all off and take all our stuff.

Taxi Driver : I understand English!

Red in the face, we pile into the van, and escape the desperate hounds behind us.

Only to be confronted by a virtual mockingbird of chatter. Our taxi driver, another in a series of short, hardened Vietnamese men, refuses to let a moment of silence pass between us as soon as I let slip that I can understand Vietnamese. By ‘understand’ Vietnamese I meant that I could decipher basic conversation. Mockingbird launches into a 15-minute tirade, of which I could understand one out of five sentences. Like any good Vietnamese, though, he doesn’t notice. I retreat into the corners of my mind and take a look around the van which speeds us through the Vietnamese night. Between monosyllabic Vietnamese answers, I realize that this van has a pop-up TV, a pioneer deck, two different side mirrors, and one windshield wiper. I interrupt his rant to ask about the vehicle. Apparently, correct parts are hard to come by in Vietnam, because by now this hackneyed van has become a melting-pot of Asian steel. Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Thai parts have all been meticulously melded together under the care of Mockingbird. He shifts up and the van eases down a few thousand RPMs. Hey, if it works for him, it certainly works for me. Can’t say he isn’t resourceful.

Mockingbird, realizing we want to head to Laos, takes us to his own personal recommendation for a tourist agency, for which he probably receives kick-backs. We book our ticket to Laos on the earliest bus the next morning, a 10am affair through Dong Ha to Savannakhet. It costs us 25 dollars, but little do we know, included a few bus loads of agitation.

We end our day at a familiar spot in Hue, on the deck of a restaurant on the Perfume River. The beer sponsored neon signs across the Perfume blitz the night, crashing the glare of advertising onto the natural serenity of the river. The reflections on the water’s surface ensures that we double down on our neon exposure for the night. Despite the eye sore, we manage to enjoy dinner. Our day over, we head back to the hotel.