The bus stopped on a random street and the driver told us it was time to get off. We grabbed our backpacks, and, as we walked off, we realized we had zero idea where we were. Luckily, we saw a couple of backpackers that looked like they knew what they were doing, so we followed them. We got through the Thailand border exit pretty easily. But, once we got through, all we saw was a long bridge that went straight into darkness.

A man on a tuk tuk waved us over, and, as we approached, he chuckled and pointed and said “Laos”. He spoke next to no English, so further questions would be futile. Besides, it was getting late, and we had no idea where we were so figured he must be right. Now this is the second time we should have thought “Do not get in a random tuk tuk and cross the bridge into the darkness, this is not safe” But again we thought: “Okay, this is how we do this!” Now for those who are not aware, there are a variety of tuk tuks, but this was basically a man on a small bike with a wagon in the back. Mal and I jumped in and laughed the whole ride at how we were taking a tuk tuk across the border. Well I can tell you the laughs didn’t last long.

When we arrived at the Laos border entrance, we were told it was closing in around 10 minutes. We are very lucky two other people were there, as they told us where to go. We went to the window and found out we didn’t have enough money to enter. Wonderful! We went to the ATM and, after paying a ridiculous service fee, we were back at the window. We got our visas just in time and we were ready to crash for the night. We were able to use the WIFI at the border to first find out that we were in a city called Bokeo, and that Luang Probang, the city we planned to stay at, was hours away. We found the nearest hotel which was up on the hill that overlooked the border. It was a bit pricey for what we were paying, but it was close and had free breakfast, so we thought why not. The other tourists told us to jump in the back of the truck with them because it would drive us all to our hostels. We were relieved to arrive in Laos safe…..

As we headed out Mal and I realized we were driving further away from where we were staying. We were exhausted and just wanted to be there already. The driver dropped off the other two first, and when we gave him the address of where we were staying, he had never heard of it. This is where the maps-me app came in clutch. I jumped in the front seat of the truck as Mal hung out in the back with our baggage. I had to direct the driver back towards the border and, the next thing I know, we were heading up back roads and the driver was not happy. To be honest, both Mal and I were getting pretty freaked out that we had the wrong directions. As we got to the top of the hill and through the forest, we arrived at a beautiful gold luxury looking hotel. We could not believe our eyes, and we were so relieved to be done traveling for the night! We thanked the driver, and he was gone in seconds.

As we walked further into the hotel, we were amazed at how massive and gorgeous it was, however, the emptiness and lack of any person or sound made us super anxious. As we turned to look down a hall, we found dirty plates out and scattered along the floor. My hair stood up on my arms realizing this hotel had been abandoned. We didn’t know what had happened, but it was clear people left in a rush. We both ran into the lobby and fell frozen. The door to the lobby room didn’t lock and all we knew was that we were not safe.

We were high up on a hill with literally nothing around us. The border was closed, so no option to return. To get to the city where the other backpackers were dropped off would involve us walking miles on the highway – “hell no!”. So, we thought the next best option would be to grab a room key, hide in there, and head back to border first thing in the morning. We grabbed a key and headed to the room. As we entered with caution, we found inside some people’s bags and belongings sprawled all over the room as if someone was searching through their bags for all things valuable.

Now, I can be creative, but I could not make this story up if I tried. Tears started falling from my eyes as we ran back to the lobby and hid behind the desk. The lobby was all windows and the hotel was all open which meant there was no safe place. We felt completely exposed and scared. We decided it was time to call my parents.

We hid under the lobby desk as I told them what had happened, and I told them how much I loved them. Some of you may understand the fear and some may think we were being dramatic. To be honest, I can laugh at the story now but, in my mind, I knew that I wasn’t going to make it out of this and I wasn’t going home. I wasn’t sure if this was the doing of a drug lord, human trafficking, or some kind of virus outbreak. Mal had the US embassy on her phone and I was speaking to my parents who were pulled over during a massive snow storm in Detroit crying that there was nothing they could do to help. The embassy told us they were 2 hours away and there was no one to come get us. They pinged our phones and said they would stay alert of where we were until the morning.

That’s when we heard a car pull up. Two women, each holding a child; and a short man dressed in an open white button-up shirt, black dress pants and no shoes walked in. The women jumped back when they saw us and the man followed, his face in complete shock to see us. We kept everyone on the phone but lowered our arms to speak with him.

We kept it nice and short expressing we had booked with booking.com and just needed somewhere to stay for the night. What more could we have done or said at this point? He didn’t seem to know how to work the computer to check the reservation, so he grabbed a key and told us to follow. As we followed him, he asked when we would be leaving, we replied “7am”. He told us that “His men would be awake and drive us where we needed to go” Another red flag. He offered to bring us beer, but we declined and said we needed to get rest. We were on the first floor and very thankful for that, we knew this would give us an escape route. We thanked the embassy and asked to be kept pinged via the gps on our cell phones, and I told my parents we would continue to update them as things started to feel more under control for the time being. We had to make the best of the situation, and we were safe; for now. We had no clean water and had nothing to eat since breakfast. We barricaded ourselves in the room, moving all furniture against the door. We used the kettle in the room to boil the water to clean it and made two bagged meals – thankful for those! We repacked our bags as needed, and you know damn right we slept with our pepper sprays in hand and boots on our feet. We woke up around 6am, climbed out the window and started the hike down to the border. We were terrified that, if anyone saw us, they would come after us. As we arrived at the border, we dropped our bags and fell to the ground laughing. To this day we are still unsure if it was a complete fluke or are blessed to be alive. We got on a bus within the hour to Luang Prabang and never looked back. Now we feel this was a wakeup call to remind us that we were two young women traveling in places where we didn’t speak the language nor knew anything about the area. We realize we needed to be smarter about our decisions and we were from that point forward. We are blessed to be able to do these trips, and being spontaneous is the best way to do them – that is, after being smart.