Hitching a ride
Two 'wanidas' thumb their way through Laos

This article appeared in Passionfruit: A Women's Travel Journal, Winter 2000.

By Kari J. Bodnarchuk

ood Lord,” says Tara. “I've never hitchhiked before.” Tara and I are in northwestern Laos, just across the border from Thailand, and had planned on taking a 10-seat minibus from the Laotian border town, Hua Xai, up north to Luang Nam Tha. But when we arrived at the station, an hour early, we were told “bus go” already. It’s a 260-mile drive—too far to walk—so we are hitchhiking. 

I’ve hitchhiked in Tasmania and New Zealand and found it a great way to meet people. It seemed safe, so long as I was with someone else. The one time I hitched alone, I was so scared my thumb was visibly shaking. Nothing terrible happened, but I promised myself I’d never hitch alone again.

Traveling in pairs opens all sorts of doors, and that’s the main reason why Tara and I have stayed together for six months. Otherwise, we are the most unlikely travel companions. Tara is an accountant from Ireland who’s up by 7:00 each morning, goes to sleep by 10 p.m. and follows a steady routine in between. I’m a writer from New England whose brain won’t function before 10 a.m. and works best after 10 p.m. Tara is one of nine kids. I’m an only child. She hates to swim. I love to scuba dive. She left home to work in an Australian bank for a year and I quit my job to wander around the world for 18 months.

We met when I was midway through my trip and Tara was on her way home, planning to make several quick stops in Asia. We ran into each other in a guesthouse in Java, a week after I was attacked by four men. We were headed in the same direction and decided to travel together for safety reasons. We’ve stuck together ever since.  

Over the past six months, we’ve climbed volcanoes, explored remote lagoons and gone far off the beaten path. Though Tara had never gone hiking or camping before, I managed to talk her into a nine-day trek through a Malaysian jungle—at the start of monsoon season. Three days into the trip, we nearly drowned in a flash flood. Our boots washed away and we had to walk barefoot through a leech-ridden jungle for three days to reach civilization. Yet despite that experience, Tara’s still letting me plan our itinerary.

“I don’t even know where Laos is,” she said when I first brought it up.

“A landlocked country that borders Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and China,” I answered, reading from our guidebook. “And it has the same size population as Ireland.” I breezed over the part that says Laos was the most heavily bombed country during the Vietnam War and still has hundreds of undetonated land mines. And I didn’t mention that “anti-government rebels have been known to attack vehicles along this road with small arms, grenades and rocket-launchers,” which the guidebook refers to several times. We can always avoid that road, I figure. She agreed it sounded intriguing, or maybe I hooked her with the Ireland reference.

What we both discovered after arriving, however, is that simply finding public transportation is can be difficult. Buses are often late, canceled or full. Or, they leave early, which is why we’re walking down an unmarked road outside Hua Xai, hoping for a lift.

Every day, truck drivers ply the road between Hua Xai and Vieng Phoukha, a village midway to Luang Nam Tha. They fill their lorries with coal and make the 140-mile return trip in a day, picking up passengers along the way: children walking to school, women looking for lifts to border towns and, on this day, stranded travelers.

Forty-five minutes after sticking out our thumbs, we are hoisting our packs and heaving our sweaty selves up into the front seat of a coal truck. Samran, a Thai truck driver, is perched behind the wheel, wearing a woolen ski hat in the 110-degree heat. He greets us in fluent English and spends the next few hours teaching us phrases in Thai, Laotian, Filipino and Korean. A bright spark, despite a fourth-grade education.

He asks about our families and tries to figure out what the heck two wanidas—Laotian for women—are doing out here, traveling without our boyfriends or husbands. “Oh, the boyfriends are at home,” says Tara. When she adds, “Men are a big headache,” Samran laughs so hard his shoulders bounce. 

We swap stories for several hours and when the conversation begins to lag, we try to amuse Samran with Western music: Enya, the Counting Crows and the Cranberries. When the tape gets stuck between “play” and “eject,” he sings us a few of his favorite songs: “Country Road” and “Sunshine on My Shoulders.” Every hour or so, Samran asks us to reach in back and pull out a greasy bottle full of homemade whiskey. “Makes the trips go smoothly,” he says between swigs.

Samran drives for six hours along a road that’s so narrow and potholed, I can’t imagine how the buses manage. Landslides nearly block the road in some places, and to get around them we must drive precariously close to a ledge with no guardrail. The road was built four years earlier for coal transporters, and since Samran drives it every day for three months a year he knows the route well.

Heading north, the terrain changes from tall rounded mountains smothered in dense jungle to squat, dry hills covered in short bush. Villages are clusters of thatched homes constructed on mountain passes or along flat areas surrounded by rice fields. At several, we see women sitting on their front steps smoking pipes and men strolling down the street with hunting rifles slung over their shoulders.  

As we near the coal pits, Samran drops us at Ban Kun, a village with about 30 families. Since there’s no guesthouse, Samran arranges for

us to stay with Sippa, a 20-year- old Laotian woman. It’s late and we won’t catch another lift until morning, he says.

Sippa welcomes us into her home for the night, and we sit inside at a picnic table talking to her and two other village women in broken Laotian. Using a dictionary, we manage discussions about the village, tropical fruit and cosmetics, and then Tara and I fall asleep on a bamboo platform in Sippa’s store, listening to rats scurry around outside our bug nets.

By seven o’clock the next morning, we’re at the roadside waiting for a bus, or any vehicle to give us a lift. Every hour, about 20 curious kids take a school break and come visit us. Tara keeps the kids busy by reading from their schoolbooks and teaching them games of tag. When she gets tired, I show them how to hold a blade of grass between their thumbs and make it screech with a forceful blow. Then I entertain them with my mini tape recorder. At first, only one or two will speak into the recorder, while others look at me with timid, even frightened, eyes. But when I play back their voices, the kids giggle with excitement and wonder. Soon they’re jockeying into position to speak into the microphone.

Finally, I see a bus approaching. It’s bursting with people, locals and a few foreigners. I wave to stop the bus and then watch as it disappears around a bend, leaving behind a long cloud of dirt. “Tem,” says Sippa—“full.” Tara and I debate our options. We still want to head north, but if no ride comes we’ll have to head back to Hua Xai with a truck driver. With only three weeks in Laos and another 1,000 miles to cover, we can’t afford to get stuck in Ban Kun for another day.

Women on the road to Vang Vieng come by to check out the stranded hitchhikers.

Finally, about eight hours later we get a lift in the back of a pickup truck from three forestry officials. The road is so chewed up and potholed, it takes an hour to cover the first 14 miles and three and a half hours to reach Luang Nam Tha, 80 miles away. As we drive, the wheels kick up powdery dirt that rolls over us whenever we brake. I have Tara’s sweaty pajama top (the only thing within reach) wrapped around my nose and mouth so I can breathe, and Tara has a sarong wrapped around her face. It makes no difference, and by the time we’re dropped off, we’re covered in bronze dirt.

“You look like a raccoon,” I say, when Tara takes off her glasses.

“Bloody ‘ell, like, I can barely breath,” she says in her Irish trill, mouth hanging open and gasping for air.

“I know, I’d give anything to spit right now, but there’s absolutely no saliva in my mouth,” I say.

We spend a day in Luang Nam Tha, scraping dirt off our bodies and clothing. Then we hitch out to Muang Sing, a quiet town on a dusty plateau, six miles from the Chinese border. The town was once the heart of opium trade in Southeast Asia and poppies still grow in nearby fields. We learn all about this once-thriving industry from two monks we meet on a trip out to the border. They explain that that opium is still a big industry, and then try to sell us some, completely shattering my beliefs in the purity of monastic life.

As it turns out, the biggest daily event in Muang Sing still revolves around the central market, but it’s the sale of rattan, dried frogs and sarongs that keeps the community pumping now. Each day, villagers from nearly 12 tribes converge on the small town to sell trinkets to tourists and more traditional market goods to one another.

We arrive at the markets at 5:45 the next morning and watch men hauling in buffalo carcasses and women selling veggies, pasta and pink things, now dead, that I can’t quite identify. Other people sit at short tables held up by tree stumps and stacks of rocks. We join two women for breakfast, which consists of noodles bulked up with lettuce leaves and green beans, and spiced with hot chili powder—a sure eye-opener.

As the sky reddens, casting its glow across our breakfast table, a man takes a big machete and lets it fall across the neck of a buffalo. Then he chops off the legs, sending splinters of bone spraying from the cutting board and onto the back of a mangy dog. He suspends the bloody legs above the cutting board and continues carving, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. Nearby, a Hmong woman hovers over baskets of noodles and a woman from the Akha tribe fingers several dried frogs for sale.