By Joyan Tan

The rain had not stopped for three days. Typhoon Yagi was a devil on the warpath and we were wide-eyed strangers visiting her land.

"Maybe we should take the train back instead," she said, biting her nails.

I did a quick Google search for 'train Luang Prabang to Vientiane 11 Sept' but the only seats left were priced exorbitantly. We had arrived two days ago on the high-speed train that cut across the country like a gaping open wound. The Laos-China Railway. Chinese money. The train had brought us here within two hours but now it was time to return and we only had two eight-hour bus tickets over unknown dirt roads.

The bus station was a sleepy, nondescript structure with a few minibuses in the clearing and a single lady at the ticket booth. The rain had finally stopped. Yagi's anger had been sated by bountiful sacrifices across the Philippines, Vietnam, and Myanmar. We waited for another hour. The air was humid and sticky and a layer of dust clung to every surface. I did not dare to close my eyes for fear of falling asleep. Another lady in uniform came and beckoned us to cross the road where a second, more crowded bus station stood. Some shops faded in the background, sheltering themselves from the afternoon sun with hanging fabrics, the silhouettes of shopkeepers shifting behind.

This was not our first time backpacking in Southeast Asia together. We had met each other as freshwomen in Singapore living a few doors away from each other. Our first summer, we applied and got into the same internship in Jakarta. Since then, we regularly travelled together, looking for the cheapest deals and occasionally getting ourselves into sticky situations.

Her eyes narrowed as we made our way into the station, shifting the weight of her backpack on her shoulders. She was of small stature and had a habit of putting her fiercest face on in unfamiliar situations. It worked well to scare off any potentially friendly strangers. Sometimes, too well. We stood in silence, eyes searching. Some locals lounged on the colored, faded seats lined up in the middle, looking listlessly into the distance. Others stared into a different distance reflected by the light of their phone screens.

"Vientiane? 9:20? Here? Which one?"

The lady glanced at my printed ticket and gestured lazily towards the back of the station. We loaded ourselves on the minibus, jamming our bags tightly between our thighs and looping any straps around our arms. The departure time came and left. The driver was waiting for the bus to fill before he set off. I texted a few friends to please pray for our safety as we take a bus back to Vientiane because there have been heavy rains and reports of some landslides and flooding so we don't know what might happen but will you please pray for us?

This trip had been different. It has taken us just a little longer to fall into the easy camaraderie we had enjoyed in our earlier years. Since our last trip, she had gotten married and I had moved abroad to study. I wondered if she wished that her present travel companion was her husband. Instead, she got me, unattuned to the rhythms of living together and stubborn in my own ways. Just the day before, we had, on the spur of the moment, inked ourselves with matching tattoos in a rundown parlor rated 5.0 on Google Maps—a small rice bowl with chopsticks—to mark our 10 years of traveling together. 

The bus finally departed. We found ourselves on a poorly-constructed roller coaster without any seat belts as we lurched through large potholes and swerved around bends that threatened to fling us over the edge of the dirt roads. We grabbed onto the seats in front tightly and braced ourselves for the impact of each bump and thud, our bottoms too close to the ground for comfort. Once, the bus stopped at the roadside to fix its engine while we waited, captive victims as we were. Later, a fellow passenger in the backseat vomited and we quietly held our breaths as we waited for the stench to pass. I tried not to dwell on it. When our bus pulled into pitch-black Vientiane nine hours later, I breathed a silent prayer.

We sat down for dinner at a nearby restaurant, grateful for the solid ground beneath our feet. Earlier on the bus, I had seen her looking intently out of the window, her lips moving furiously. I mentioned it in passing, mid-bite in my fish and chips.

She looked up from her noodles and smiled ruefully. "I was saying the rosary. I had never said it so many times before."

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