The Barefoot Escape
Mission Brief
Specs:
Location: Phonsavan, Laos
Current time: August 12th, 5:08 am
Target: Arrive at Hanoi Airport by 10:55 pm on August 15th
Intel:
Mom’s wedding is the morning of August 18th, in Northern Michigan. This you cannot miss. To make the wedding you must catch the bus today at 6:00 am from Phonsavan Laos to Vinh Vietnam. This bus only comes 2x a week, if you do not depart in the vehicle today you will miss the wedding. From Vinh take a bus to Hanoi and reach the airport.
Moving on from the CIA memo style framing device, I was on a mission to get to the airport. This came at the end of the Asia leg of my 2023 backpacking trip. I had already sold my motorbike and was relegated to taking busses. I spent the prior two days in Pansavan, a town where the biggest attraction were ‘Plains of Jars’: meadows with ancient rocks cut in roughly jar shape.
But today the bus came and I needed to be on that bus. My hotel was about a 15 min walk from the bus station and my bag takes 20 min to pack in the morning so when I woke up 8 min late at 5:08 I was cutting it close but still doing ok. I packed my bag and by 5:30 was ready to leave the hotel.
This is where I ran into my first problem. The hotel’s lobby doubled as a nail salon, a nail salon that apparently was not open at 5:30 am and the door to the lobby was subsequently locked. This was inconvenient for two reasons:
The only exit that I knew of was through the lobby
In Asia, it is common to take your shoes of when you enter a building. I had politely taken off my only pair of shoes and left them in the lobby.
I usually travel with 2 pair of shoes but recently had destroyed one pair in the jungle and left them nailed to a hostel wall in Luang Prabang - where they are to this day.
Loud knocking did not open the door and as time ticked away I decided to go barefoot. The fire escape/back exit led to a yard with an 8 foot fence and a locked gate. Seeing no other options I threw my bag over and climbed myself. Leaving the hotel was not supposed to be this difficult.
My sad bare feet…
I arrived just before 6 to an empty bus station. This was not good, there should be a few other people waiting for the bus at least. But in Laos time is a malleable dough and a 6 o’clock bus regularly becomes a 6:10 or 6:20 bus. I had also checked the day before to confirm this was the right bus and station. But at 6:15 the station was still empty (except for one lady on the phone and one lady asleep on the bench: neither who wanted to help me much). Even the ticket counters were still closed. At this point I started to be mildly concerned, so when a few tuk-tuk drivers showed up to start the day I wandered over to ask them about the bus route.
It was communicated through pantomime and translation apps that I had missed the bus. After more frantic pantomime and intense translation, I was able to impress upon the drivers that I needed that bus.
One driver agreed to take me and we roared off. We flew down the road, passing the dreary-eyed morning traffic left and right. After 15 min of flooring it, we caught up to the bus and the driver frantically waved at the bus to pull over and let me on. I paid $10, more than the going rate of ~$1 that a typical 15 min ride would have cost, but a fare I was more than willing to pay in exchange for the service.
A frantic morning ride
With the bus pulled over, I tried to board and was almost turned away. This was not your every-day school bus — it was a sleeper bus. Everyone got a very small, laying down area, stacked two tall on each side. To keep the ‘beds’ clean, you also took your shoes off to get on the bus. Except I had no shoes to remove. After some annoyed gestures met apologetic gestures and eventually I was thrown a towel to clean my feet and let on the bus.
On the bus I was able to relax until the Laos/Vietnam border. This wasn’t a particularly hard crossing, just get off the bus, let security check you visa, stamp your passport, and scan your bag. the only interesting part is that I was doing it barefoot. Luckily, no one seemed to notice, but it felt a bit odd in a dry official government office bare foot and walking across county borders barefoot.
I changed busses in Vinh no problem and when we reached Hanoi it was about 3 am. Check in to the hotel was 2 pm and I didn’t want to pay for another night — besides, I was resting on the bus and only had one day in Hanoi before leaving for the States and wanted to explore some.
The sleeper bus (with more toe pics, I should charge for this story).
I walked to the hotel, and a very confused receptionist gave me a pair of shower flip-flops and let me leave my bad at the hotel until check in. I finally had shoes!
Hanoi in the Morning
Later, after officially checking in, I took a shower and left my shoes outside the shower door. But as these were hotel shoes that were not meant to be left outside doors, housekeeping picked them up and I was once again barefoot. Luckily, shoe shopping is much easier in Hanoi than on a bus and I was able to pick up a pair of flipflops without much trouble.
I made the flight, made the wedding, and all was good in the world.
Congratulations Mr. & Mrs. Hessen
This story was from 2023. Following this I stayed about two months in America before I got another job in Singapore and strung together a series of flights across Europe where I was able to crash on friends couches and travel for 2 more months towards Singapore.
I worked there for more than a year and a half at Wholesnail - Singapore’s first snail farm. Working full time at a startup takes a lot of time, and writing was not able to get done (sorry for the gap in blog posts!).
Two (three?) month ago I left my job - startups are unpredictable. I’m now back to traveling and for the next few months I have a lot more free time to write more; stay tuned. I’ll catch up on the older stories like this one, getting robbed in Istanbul, getting a ticket for street racing a Vespa in Italy, and crashing a jazz festival in Japan.
I’m also gaining new travel stories now, once again, I bought a motorcycle. With it I am driving around northern Vietnam, although currently I am hiding from my 4th typhoon in the past month, writing in a cafe.
Footnote:
While writing a portion of this I was at a cat cafe and one decided I needed help. Here are Harold’s contributions:
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My laptop has been dying slowly for a while. After circumnavigating the globe (twice), being through 5 or 6 motorcycle crashes, and being used daily at work: it is running out of steam. Keys on the keyboard keep spoiling and the keyboard cannot be replaced (a previous repair included wood-glueing the folding hinge and back panel, providing structural stability but also locking all the parts together). Because a backpacking trip isn’t the best time to buy a shiny new laptop, I’m trying to make this one last as long as possible and have ‘fixed’ this by re-wiring useless keys to more useful keys that have broke. The ‘page down’ key for example is much better utilized as ‘g’, and the right shift key has been converted to the ‘a’ key (the left shift key still capitalizes). The broken keys are then removed to prevent accidental clicking and the new function is written on the replaced key in sharpie. This is as annoying as it sounds. But country girls I make do.
The current state of my keyboard, I’m running out of ‘useless’ keys to reroute to.
One more cat pic, better to end with a cat than a broken keyboard.
