Is this China!?

March 11, 2012. Written in Vientiane, Laos.

After a long train of 34 hours from Xinyang to Kunming, I wanted to take the bus straight to Laos and leave China, but before that I was so tired I decided to take a day of at Kunming's Cloudland Hostel first.
Except from switching books with a Japanese guest, talking some to a few girls from Guangzhou and going out for a jog in town I did nothing at all. I realized that  I might be traveling for a long time, but at least half of that time is spend doing absolutely nothing!

The next day, on my way to the bus station, I bumped into a white guy with a backpack that seemed to be heading to the bus station as well.
"Are you going to Laos by any coincidence?"
Travis, 23 from America was traveling around mainly in China, but also went to Japan and was now going to spend some time in Laos.

Together, we made it to the bus station. After having dinner, we entered our bus. It was my first sleeping bus so far. With our backpacks, the aisle was so narrow that it was hardly possible to presume. The beds too, where about as narrow as you can imagine. They were exactly the broadness of my body. This was going to be a hard trip!

I found it hard to fall asleep, but when I finally started to feel tired, two Chinese people that were almost 5 seats away from each other started to scream something about buying apples or not at the next stop. This conversation didn't seem to come to an end, and they did not seem to care at all about the noise they were making.
"I think that you can get them for 20 Yuan at the next stop!!" the lady would shout carelessly.
The strangest thing was though, that except from Travis and me, none of the other passengers seemed bothered by this. Everyone would just keep on snoring as if they didn't hear anything at all, and maybe they really didn't. I gave up on sleeping and told myself to be just a little more patient. In a few hours I would not be in China anymore. In Laos, people would not do something like this, I believed.

At around 6 in the morning, the bus stopped somewhere, and didn't move on for more than 2 hours. Travis and I wondered why the bus was stopping here so long. Maybe we were already at the border? We decided to go out and investigate the area. The environment had changed drastically. The streets were filled with tropical trees, people would pass by on small motorcycles and everything was written in not only Chinese, but also in Lao.
Maybe we had already arrived in Laos? We had obviously not passed the border, but this just didn't seem like China. I stopped a man passing by and asked him in my broken Chinese.
"Is this China?"
The man laughed like crazy, repeated my sentence and walked on, but an answer to my question he did not give. According to his crazy laugh though, my question must have been a crazy one, which supposedly meant that we were indeed still in China.

After the bus finally moved on, it took another 1 or 2 hours before we made it to the border. In front of the border, many people went off the bus, and a new load of people came. Among these people, was a group of Chinese backpackers. They seemed different from the other Chinese people I have met so far. More fun, playful and open-minded. Come to think of it, it was the first time I had ever seen Chinese backpackers. The fact that they were backpackers alone seemed to distinct them from the other people of their country.

The departure hall on the Chinese side was huge and official, but the entrance office at the Laos side was a joke. You could just sneak into the country from the back of the toilet, and except from a small office with a dirty paper on which the prices for Visa are written down, there was absolutely nothing to mention. People would break in the line but there was no official at all to say something about this. In the back of the office I noted a poster of a South East Asian woman in a bikini. The guy to check the passports was sitting outside on a bench as if he was checking tickets for a swimming pool.

After entering Laos, the roads got worse and worse.  I was not going to get any sleep at all and besides, I started to feel sick due to the bumpy roads. After every few hours, the bus would make a brief stop at the side of the road. During these stops, all I could do was fall down on the floor and close my eyes.

When we finally arrived in Luang Parang, more than 30 hours had passed. We were hungry like crazy, but first we had to find a hotel. Together with Travis and the Chinese backpackers, we took a tuk-tuk downtown.