China to Laos: A Vehicular Travel Experience

It’s hard to say where to start describing a three day international trip from southern China to northern Laos. When trying to convey the gravity of the trip appropriately to a fellow traveler in Luang Prabang, I found myself instinctually referring to it as “quite the vehicular travel experience.” I think the phrase ‘vehicular travel experience’ captures the essence of what we went through across the borders of these two communist countries.

I could go on about the 50+ hours in transit, how the number of vehicles we used reached double digits, or that the bumpy terrain under the guise of roads were in such a state that construction workers were digging out paths right in front of us. I'll excersise a bit of prudence and just talk about the disastrous wreck we witnessed on our way to the small Southern China town of Mengla.

On the curvy, narrow mountain roads of deep southern China, I’d be reluctant to drive a big car, let alone a truck or anything than needs space for wide turns. Well, someone thought it made sense to force through an 18-wheeler carrying something enormous bearing resemblance to a turbine engine. As anyone could have predicted, the truck’s back half fell off the road mid-turn, its metal rear bumper cutting through the pavement and rendering the vehicle immovable. It’s front end was stranded on the far side of the road, effectively blocking all passage. It was the kind of scene that you can only stare at drop-jawed in utter helplessness. Traffic stopped dead on both sides. A group of roughly 40 witnesses stood on a hillside overlooking the vanquished beast of a truck. The Chinese men were chain smoking. The Dai minority women dressed in flowing, colorful fabrics and traditional head-dresses sat helplessly on tree trunks. We were stopped for a good hour before someone had the idea of creating ramps beside the paved road on both sides of the front end of the truck. The ‘ramps’ were actually just stones angled to give a slope from ground to road and provide enough traction to maneuver around the wreck. Cars could go one at a time off the road on one side and back on at the other side with the help of this device and the direction of the dozen self-anointed traffic cops.

The whole ridiculous process reminded of me of a textbook schematic on facilitated diffusion. I won't bother extrapolating, as my street cred is bound to take a hit at even the mention of cell transport mechanisms on my webpage. Instead, I'll just post this ambiguous graphic on the web and leave it up to you to find some correlation to the wreck.