We finally made it to Luang Prabang, but the bus ride was our fist real travel hiccup.

We boarded the bus at 8AM and, for the most part, everything was fine. Once all the main passengers were on, however, a few Lao guys got on the bus with lawn chairs, cracked them open in the aisle, and sat down. We all looked a bit quizzically at them, but we have seen wackier things, so we just went with it. Then we noticed that two of them had AK-47s. Methinks this trip shall be interesting. We'll get back to this turn of events in a bit.

As the ride wore on, the "air conditioned" bus just got hotter and hotter. It also seemed to have some problems getting over some of the hills. The 350 km ride from Vientiane to Luang Prabang is almost exclusively through mountains, so problems getting up and down hills would not bode well for the remainder of the trip.

We stopped for lunch consisting of mystery meat and rice or mystery meat and soup. Since we could more easily pick the mystery meat out of the soup, we took that route. All things considered, the soup wasn't bad, although while the meat wasn't crunchy, it certainly was way chewier than it should have been.

We were hanging around the lunch stop a lot longer than the other buses, and then we found out why. The bus driver had cracked open the side of the bus, pulled out his tools, and had been tinkering for a while on something that had apparently gone awry. Since we were only halfway through the trip, this just didn't look promising.

We finally boarded the bus and read more in our tour guide about the road we were on. Apparently, Route 13 was lined with Hmong insurgents up until 2003. They mostly surrendered in 2003, and up until the end of 2004 there were only one or two armed clashes. Since then, there haven't been any. Just in case, though, the government requires an armed guard or two on the bus.

One of the guards was sitting a few seats behind us (on his comfy lawn chair in the aisle). He was wearing jeans, boots, and a USA sweatshirt. He pointed his weapon willy nilly as he moved it from side to side. After Aric's lesson in gun safety at the Bull Run shooting range, watching this guy with his weapon gave me the heebie jeebies. At the same time, Bev had been silently plotting ways to survive if the bus lost control and crashed over the side of the mountain. Not the most relaxing bus trip ever!

When we arrived in Luang Prabang, almost 2 hours later than we should have, we were sweaty and relieved to be off the dang bus. We spoke with some of our fellow passengers who were at the front of the bus, a Belgian couple, and they told us the rest of the story.

Turns out, the issue was with the brake pressure. As we were descending through the mountains, the pressure gauge would red line (they nervously watched it during the last 5 hours of the ride), and rather than risk losing the brakes, the bus driver would stop, get out, address the issue for the time being, drive a little more, and repeat.

I had just recently told Bev that we should appreciate the difficulty in travel in our new countries, and that it is more interesting if everything isn't handed to us on a silver spoon like at home. So, when we got off the bus and I was moaning about the crappy bus ride, she turned to me, and said mischievously, "You said you wanted it interesting, didn't you?" Her timing is impeccable.

We picked out a few guest houses to check on when we got into town, and when we arrived at each one, we heard the four-letter word beginning with "F-U" that every backpacker hates - "FULL." We finally found a slightly more expensive room than we would have liked, but since it was the last one in the guest house and was clean, we took it.

We went out for dinner at a nice little place right along the Mekong and then settled back in to sleep off the bus ride and get geared up for Luang Prabang.

More to come soon!