It has not taken long to figure out that traveling is a very slow process in Lao. We have been in Lao for nine full days and five of those have been travel days: three days on boats and two on buses. There seems to be two main reasons why travel is so slow. One, the roads are pretty bad and, two, transportation is incredibly infrequent. Lao infrastructure is minimal, although the roads we drove on the past two days were recently paved. But in Lao its often quicker to take boats than buses. But the infrequency of boats and buses increases travel time even more. I think this is caused by Lao being a rural country and people don’t have many reasons to travel great distances. Also, I think there’s something with the Communist government blocking free competition. For instance, I’ve heard that boat owners participate in a lottery to see who gets to do the highly traveled Huay Xai-LP route; supposedly a boat usually only gets picked once every three months, but makes a ton on money on that one day. But if it were a free market and that lucrative, lots of boatsmen would do the route independently, rather than be at the mercy of the government ticket office and its lottery. I’ll have to do another post on my thoughts of the commies here. The last thing that hinders transportation is that if you want to get to/from anywhere besides Vientiane and LP, you’ll likely have to string together several buses of sawngthaews. It’s just kind of frustrating. The pace of travel seems even slower after being in India where jeeps, buses, and trains leave at every minute from anywhere to everywhere and Thailand where there’s an extensive bus network and good roads.

It’s also frustrating when you can see so much more efficient ways of doing things; perhaps this is a curse of having just come from Thailand. From the border at Huay Xai to Luang Prabang, it was quickest to take a two-day “slow boat.” Yet, it could’ve taken one day if the boats left at 7 or 8am instead of 10am and they left on time. Yesterday, we were going to go east from Nong Khiaw to Phonsavan. While it looked shorter on a map to go directly there, transportation wise, it was faster and supposedly more comfortable to backtrack through Luang Prabang. Either way, it was going to take two days, due to the frequency of buses. It was somewhat frustrating because we arrived in LP yesterday at noon, but couldn’t leave until the once-daily bus departed at 8:30am this morning. We still have a lot to see in Lao, which means we have even more time on buses and boats, so I better start getting used to it. On the other hand, the travel has not been that hard yet, just long. And since Lao is not really developed, I am enjoying seeing a lot of the country.

On a more humorous (or is it disgusting) note and to balance out my kind words for kids in my last post, I’ll say that I hate traveling with kids. They always get carsick and throw up. Yesterday and today, there were toddlers barfing all over the place.