Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
as they possibly can. Passengers are crammed onto two facing benches in the back
(“sawngthaew” means “two rows”); latecomers are left to dangle off the back, with their feet
on a running board, an experience that, on a bumpy road, is akin to inland windsurfing.
Sawngthaews also ply routes between larger towns and their satellite villages, a service for
which they charge roughly the same amount as buses. They usually depart from the regular
bus station, but will only leave when a driver feels he has enough passengers to make the trip
worth his while. Some drivers try to sweat extra kip out of passengers by delaying departure.
Your fellow passengers may agree to this, but most often they grudgingly wait. In some situ-
ations, you can save yourself a lot of trouble and waiting by getting a few fellow travellers
together and flat-out
hiring the driver
to take you where you want to go, the fares being so
ridiculously low as to make this quite affordable. To catch a sawngthaew in between stops,
simply flag it down from the side of the road and tell the driver where you're headed so he
knows when to let you off. The fare is usually paid when you get off. If the driver is working
without a fare collector, he will tend to stop on the outskirts of his final destination to collect
fares.
City transport
With even the capital too small to support a proper local bus system, transport within Lao
towns and cities is left to squadrons of motorized
samlaw
(literally, “three wheels”) vehicles,
more commonly known as jumbos and tuk-tuks. Painted in primary reds, blues and yellows,
the two types of samlaw look alike and both function as shared taxis, with facing benches
in the rear to accommodate four or five passengers.
Jumbos
are the original Lao vehicle, a
home-made three-wheeler consisting of a two-wheeled carriage soldered to the front half of a
motorcycle, a process best summed up by the name for the vehicle used in the southern town
of Savannakhet - Skylab (pronounced “sakai-laeb”), after the doomed space station that fell
to earth, piece by piece, in the late 1980s. The much more common
Tuk-tuks
, offspring of
the three-wheeled taxis known for striking terror in Bangkok pedestrians, are really just big-
ger, sturdier jumbos, the unlikely product of some Thai factory, which take their name from
their incessantly sputtering engines. Lao tend to refer to these vehicles interchangeably.
Although most northern towns are more than manageable on foot, the Mekong towns tend
to sprawl, so you'll find tuk-tuks particularly useful for getting from a bus station into the
centre of town. To flag down a tuk-tuk, wave your hand, palm face down and parallel to the
ground. Tell the driver where you're going, bargain the price and pay at the end.
Tuk-tuks are also on hand for inner-city journeys. Payment is usually per person, according
to the distance travelled and your bargaining skills. Rates vary from town to town and are
prone to fluctuate in step with rising petrol prices, but figure on paying around 5000-10,000K
per kilometre. In some towns, tuk-tuks run set routes to the surrounding villages and leave
from a stand, usually near the market, once full. Chartering tuk-tuks is also a good way to get
