Soon we understood when people say that the roads are not the best. We started our bus journey in the morning. It was a mountainous road with many lefts and rights and ups and downs.
I think it usually takes around 8 hours and we had spectacular sceneries passing by. On our bus we had an South African guy with us and he planned to go the same direction as we did. We were so happy when we arrived in Dien Bien on time and had some sun hours left to enjoy the town.
We wanted to get some food as we all didn't have anything to eat except of the lychees we bought on the market the day before. On our way to town we passed this huge statue on top of a hill. To get there we had to climb many stairs. We ran up the stairs to get the "Rocky Feeling"! My gosh, this were so many stairs... I am still sore from just thinking of it.
Here the Dien Bien the Viatnamese defeated the French and are very proud of it. The statue is under constant CCTV observation, the first we saw in Vietnam.
The view into the surrounding fields was amazing and we could have even imagined to stay here a couple of days and go around with a bike to explore more as the town was so untouched of tourism and seemed so natural.
We shared a room together to save some money and as we had to leave from the bus terminal a 5am we took the closest and cheapest guest house we found to get a couple of hours of sleep. Just before we went to bed a Corp of soldiers walked through the streets with bazookas on their sholders? I don't know if they were hunting frogs in the rice paddies, but it were the first soldiers we saw country.
Next morning we left at 5am and went again on windy roads. We climbed higher into the mountains until we finally came to the boarder crossing. We had no problems with our departure from Vietnam. The Laos boarder was interesting. As we came on a Saturday we had to pay a dollar extra for overtime surcharges. Some of the fees in these countries are always interesting as you don't know for what the money is or who they actually keep. We made it safely and all the locals waited patiently until we had our visa on arrival. We were the only 3 foreigner on the local bus.
Shortly after the boarder we witnessed how 2 guys got arrested by a couple of people in street cloths and with machine guns in their hands. Luckily this were not us!
Our bus dropped us off at this river were we had to cross in a small boat. On the other side we took our bags and started walking. We wanted to get to a bus terminal which would bring us to Luang Nham Tha. We thought it would be only 10min walk. After we had left the jetty and arrived the town, then we finally arrived after 40min at the terminal located outside of town.
As the ATM's in town didn't take foreign cards we were not able to get some Kip's, which is the local currency. So we stood at the counter trying to communicate with this guy. He didn't speak a word of English. Luckily another guy joined him and we told him that we needed to buy a ticket and that we would have Vietnam Dong, Thai Bat and US Dollars to pay for them. It took us a while, but we managed to get two tickets and a seat on the bus. We didn't have too wait long until we departed. If you don't have Kip the best other currency is Bat, then US$ and they don't accept Dong.
On the way, every time when the bus stopped the local ladies tried to sell some food at the window to the passengers. As we still didn't have money we still had to starve a little longer. The triple clothing looked very interesting and especially the head decoration was very special. They had some kind of coins attached to it and everything is very shiny.
The roads were astonishing good, only windy.
We had another stop after a couple of hours in Udomaxai and we already thought we had to stay here for the night, but found out we were lucky and a bus would leave in 10 min. So we bought some to tickets with our dollars. We still didn't have Kip's, so we couldn't get any food. Our seats this time were a little stool in the middle of the alley for Chrisy and I was sitting in the front on a little box. Every corner I had to hold on to the box so I wouldn't fly around. Our bus driver did a kind stop before leaving the town so we could quickly jump out and get some money from an ATM. All the other people in the bus waited until we returned.
It was a very long day and we were very happy after we dropped our bags in a guest house to find the night mark market and ordering an entire table of different food items from the different stalls and eat. We had some delicious vegetable spring rolls with probably the best peanut sauce ever, a papaya salad, a crispy duck, a noodle dish and a delicious dark Laos beer and fruit shake! Yummy!
Here the cost in 2012 if want to do the trip:
Bus Sapa to Dien Bien: 250.000 dong
Hotel in Dien Bien: 66.667 dong each for triple room
Bus to Muang Khuat: 100.000 dong
Boat river crossing in Laos: 20000 dong
Bus to Udomxai: 35.000 Kip
Bus to Luang Nam Tha: 96.000 Kip
As we did not have Kip at the time we had to use US$ and paid a bit more!
More pictures.
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