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Witnessing a Tragedy

Pakse Travel Blog › entry 42 of 77 › view all entries

My Backpacking Journey through Southeast Asia at the end of 2006 and into 2007. The ups and downs of my trip and the many beautiful places I visited. Trully an Experience of a lifetime!

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Witnessing a Tragedy

December 13, 2006

Local merchants selling their daily produce

On the bus from Savannakhet to Pakse, Cedric and I were getting extremely frustrated as it was a neverending ride, with continual stops every few kilometres to pick up more people even though th bus is already jam packed with both humans and wildstock.

Along the journey, as it stopped countless times the bus was also inundated with little merchants trying to hawk their daily goods. It was quite bizarre as in neighbouring countries the locals wouldn't be jumping on the actual bus to sell their goods, but they would be battling each other to the open windows in hope that one of the passengers would buy something from them. But here in Laos the actually merchants jump onto the already jam packed bus and literally hop from one seat hand support to the other!!! aiyahs!

At one stage, when the bus stopped on the side of the road to drop off some passengers, a little kid clambered down before his mother and jumped off the bus and literally got ran over by a van-like vehicle.

Local merchants fighting to sell their BBQ eggs and chickens

There was BLOOD everywhere. The distraught mother hurried down dropping all her groceries and was wailing and becoming hysterical. The van driver was a good samaritan and had stopped the car and came rushing to the child and mother.

Fortunately enough there was a rural hospital nearby and they all hurried there with frantic hand gestures and plenty of yelling and crying.

I know it may sound wrong but after about half an hour of just sitting there, we all became frustrated and didn't see why we had to hang around anymore since the bus never crashed into the boy, it was between the van and the mother/child. Well that 30 minutes turned into an hour and then continued till about a total of 2 hours before the police came.

Even as the police arrived they were very unprofessional as they just stood around under the shade and having a smoke.

Fruit shake vendour... really nice!

It wasn't till quiet a while after that they then began asking questions. For some odd reason they were trying to measure the width of the road, the distance between the bus and the child, the distance between the bus and the parked van that crashed into the child. It was as if they didn't know how to read the measurements as they spent a good half an hour measuring and then remeasuring.

After a bit over two hours, the bus was finally on its way to Pakse. We were seriously considering hitch hiking on a tractor or another rural vehicle just to be on our way!

As we arrived at Pakse, we decided to walk to our destination and made our way to Sabaidy 2 Guesthouse. We stayed the night and organised our next trip to the Bolevan Plateau the following morning, deciding to just catch a local bus there rather than booking a tour.

That night I popped down an internet joint and just called home and relaxed with a fresh tropical fruit shake :)