A Southeast Asian journey while uni is out. Part Seven A: Journeying North

I awoke at midnight to a jarring rumble of thunder and a crack of lightning. Within minutes the rain began in earnest. I had had an email a few days before, that a tropical storm about to hit China's coastline may bring rainfall to us. But this was buckets and buckets of rain that, come morning was sluicing down the street in torrents. Storm flow drains were overflowing and the drops were fat and wet and impossible though the thought was, not slowing down.
The journey up North towards China was eleven hours and the transport was, of course, picking us up 500 metres down the road at a different hostel! Sodden to the skin, we squelched into the two minibuses and, as we crossed the bridge, the Nam Khan river roared in a brown fury below us. Just upstream, a bamboo bridge we had crossed on just days before,  was now only half left.

The fury of the monsoon was truly upon us and we wondered how our trek would fare.
A fuel stop as town petered out and one student sheepishly and theatrically realised that she had left her walking boots, not at the last guesthouse, but the one before that! We retraced our steps back into town but left a student and a teacher at the petrol station in close proximity to a decent toilet ... the big D was striking them down!
Boots collected, the two dodgy stomachs picked up, we settled into our seats for just 15 kilometres when the traffic began. Truck after truck after truck queued and the rain still pelted from the black skies. The wait promised to be long and so some brave few ventured forth into the wet melee. The massive Mekong had burst its banks and a stretch of road, sixty metres across, was inundated to a waist high depth.

Brave motorcyclists pushed their bikes through, but most treated the poor drainage and growing lines of traffic as a spectacle.
By the end of the first hour's wait a few drivers had been flooded out and were towed to land on frayed and knotted ropes by larger vehicles. Hour two and the water had barely abated. Here and there a large truck made it through. Hour three and we had two students who had slipped in the water running adjacent to the road. Hour four and two bedraggled policeman and one digger appeared.

The drainage ditches directing road water back to the river grew and the water obstacle began noticeably to fall. Four and a half hours of waiting and our drivers decided the crossing was plausible ... and so it was indeed!

The crossing still left us with a vast distance to cover before night. Distance and time were unrelated as road conditions went from rough and slow, to smooth and fast, hours of switch-back bends to steep climbs and this is not even mentioning the extremely small bladders and gippy tummies that accompanied us.
Night had swaddled us by the time we pulled into Luang Nam Tha, humours had failed, sworded words were at play and characters were exaggerated with the exhaustion that comes from a long car journey.
But at least the rain had stopped.

Remember ERASMUS students ... if you should fall into water:

• Adopt a 'floating on your back' position until you have adjusted to the water temperature.
• Don't fight the flow, go with it at a diagonal angle toward a bank.
• If it is slower flow, swim actively on your front.
• If it is fast and shallow, then stay on your back and keep your feet up to stop foot entrapment. 

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