Bangkok to Laos
Howdy! I’m alive and kicking in the northern Thai tourist mecca of Pai. I came out of the northern Laos border about 4 nights ago and have been looking for a place to relax. The whole Laos experience was amazing, and I’m so glad I went there as I had considered skipping it and just touring the north of Thailand. I met a lovely Dutch couple on a big motorbike just before going into Laos and an Aussie couple called Billy and Trish touring on a bike while in Laos. The Aussie couple are tops and I’ll probably ship my bike to Nepal with those guys instead of solo, just to cut down on the shipping cost.
Some ace kids at the Kouy Tiew (noodle soup) shop in Nong Khai
So, Southern Laos was pretty flat, a few hills here and there and Vientiane was a really good size, not too many tourists and very clean. They seem to be gentrifying the whole place and putting French style curbing and pavement in, a remnant of their colonial past. There is no garbage on the streets like in Cambodia and the people seem genuinely happy.
How now Lao cow!
I rode north to a town called Vang Vieng and stayed in an eco-lodge in my tent. The main attractions are a tube ride down the river and a large group of caves in the surrounding mountains. I went to this cave spot and a Laos guy comes up to me and offers me his services for $5, I said too expensive and he cut it down to $2. We walked to the first cave, which was about 10m deep and had a Buddha image in it. The second cave was amazing. It took about an hour to walk all the way in and ended up being about 1km deep, completely unlit. It ended in a stream and the guide stripped down ad jumped in so I did the same. It was a bit weird bathing in a stream 1km into a mountain with a Laos guy but hey, you only live once. I ended up paying him more money because he took time out of building a house to do the tour.
My cave guide Tat
There was an organic farm cafe nearby and I somehow got involved in an english teaching volunteer group. The little town ~200 people, had built a community centre out of mud bricks and the travellers staying at the organic farm would go and teach the kids how to speak english each evening from 5:30pm to 7:30. A Dutch guy, Bart, had been there for about 5 weeks and had written some songs “We all live in Ban pudding-dang” to the tune of yellow submarine was a massive hit.
Setting up school
Keen kids
So leaving the kids was a bit sad, they loved the bike and I took a few of the guys for a ride, one of them ended up screaming at me to stop cause he thought I was going to take him all the way to Vietnam haha.
Loving the bike
I tried cooking on an open fire, which turned out a bit messy. I think I used too much wood, so I kind of had a bonfire. A bit too much flame to boil water for instant noodles. The next night I made it small and within the confines of the pot that I was boiling, and it worked out much better. You can’t go past a good butane stove though!
Cooking dinner – bonfire behind the burner
I headed up north to a town called Luang Prabang and the roads were insane. Empty, well made but very high altitude and twisty. I think there may have been about 3000 bends between Vang Vieng and Luang Prabang, which made the 160km journey take about 4 hours. I averaged about 35 – 40km/hr the busses take 6 hours!!! Luang Prabang was pretty, heritage listed so unspoilt by modern brick monstrosities, but expensive and I wanted a traditional experience with camping etc. The Dutch motorcycle couple had suggested bush camping as a nice idea in Laos and I itended to try it out on my way to Phonsavan (back down south towards Vientiane and then East).
Bendy
The next day I set off quite late and reached about three quarters of the way to phonsavan. I was losing light so I decided to pitch my tent. After riding past about 4 or 5 “nah, not good enough” or “nah, too exposed” spots, I decided on a tiny cane field perched on a cliff just set back and sheltered from the road. I pitched my tent, collected some wood and sat waiting for the sun to go down. You have to realise that this was my first wild, bush-camping (non-campsite) attempt since leaving Brisbane and I was swallowing my fears of boogymen, spiders / snakes and muderers. As the sun went down and the darkness swallowed me, I built a campfire (bonfire) and sat warming my hands, noticing how black everything was outside the 2m radius of campfire light. The stars were shining and I tried to look for the southern cross for some home-country nostalgia. I heard a twig snap but I was in zen-state and I knew nothing was out there, what could there possibly be? I’d rationalised all the possibilities away except for one: men with guns. This was, after all, part of the special zone where some tourists had been killed in a hold-up 4 years before… Anyway, stamp fire out quickly, clean teeth, jump into tent and zip myself into sleeping bag (hood pulled tight with the drawstring). As I lay there, I heard this noise… Like a scraping sound, something trying to dig right beside my tent, it was even moving my head slightly. I was scared stiff and I lay really still, shut my eyes… and it stopped.. what the f#&k is that?? Some more investigation revealed it was the sound of my eyelashes scraping against the inside of my sleeping bag. What an idiot, there’s nothing out here! Well, I’d been thinking a lot about a certain someone for the last few days and I decided I needed to shift my attention onto something else. I started thinking about all my folk back home and in the UK. I thought about pretty much everyone I knew and had hung out with at some time, slowly drifting off to sleep with the memories in my head.
What’s that? I woke up with a start and looked at the clock. Midnight. Had I heard a noise? Was that a flash of light?? It was voices! In Laos! about three or four guys whispering near my tent. I hear this “whoaaaaaaaa!!!”, oh crap, they’ve seen the bike… More whispering. What am I going to do?? I roll over to make some noise and the voices go quiet. Shit! Stuff this, I’d better go make myself known instead of waiting for them to storm my little tent. I jump out of my sleeping bag, put on my shoes and slip out of the tent calling out “Sa bai dee” (Laos for hello). I hear this gruff voice reply in greeting and about seven guys come out of the bushes… all with AK47s. Hahaha, I KNEW they’d have guns! Score to Damoooo one – nill, jackpot!!! Oh shit, they’ve got GUNS! aaargh!
So the main guy starts indicating with hand signals that he didn’t want me sleeping in the cane field, and I was still struggling out of my sleep so I replied to him in English “Oh, you don’t want me here.” thinking he’d understand. He made the signals again and I replied in English again. Then he started yelling at me and waving his arms around and I knew I should probably do something quick so I went over and started packing my tent up. THE quickest I’ve ever done it, maybe 6 minutes in total from having the full site set up to having the complete kit on my bike. The guys all stood around me in a circle and each time I’d take something useless and western out of my tent, they’d all go “Ooooh, aaaah” and then laugh. The main guy put his gun down and put on my motorcycle jacket. I was like “oh noo, don’t touch that.. c’mon!” Luke Skywalker style to the inquisitive Yoda. They made me ride back to a checkpoint where a serious looking older man (all the other guys were under 20) said that I had to go to the next village, so I followed the truck to the town and they put me in the military barracks and told me to go to sleep. Big Man On Campus came and asked me questions and told me not to worry, I could sleep here safely. I lay down next to a soldier and tried to sleep…
Every hour someone would come in with a gun and make the chick-clack chick-chick noises that guns make when they’re being prepared to inflict death and I’m not sure if they were just trying not to wake me, but every time it happened, they’d shine their torch on me. So the words “execution style” kept going through my head.
The next morning started with roosters, the smell of wood burning and axe-chopping. It was then that I fully realised just how primitive these villages actually are. So everyoe waits around while Big Man wakes up, finds the local copper and they interrogate me. The Big Man asks me if I can speak Laos, in Laos. It was similar to that scene in The Great Escape when the Nazi commander says to Richard Attenbrough in English that he has really good German, to which Attenbrough replies “Thank you”, thereby blowing his cover. I didn’t fall for it. They ask me why I have two helmets, and am travelling solo, to which I replied that my companion used it in Malaysia, and she’d use it again in Spain… But for the moment she’s elsewhere. Didn’t sound very believable after I said it but I think they eventually got sick of my very good dumb-playing and let me go. Guys with guns don’t smile, and from this little experience I realise I don’t like guns even a little bit. One town with 100 people, 10 army guys and the most modern equipment in town was the weaponry. Unbelievable.
Some Hills
Hilly!
So I travelled on to Phonsavan and did a tour of the Plain of Jars, pretty much a big wide open plain strewn with ancient jars carved out of stone. The plain was scattered with mines from the Vietnam war and a specific path had been cleared for tourists to walk on by a mine clearing group called MAG. The Plain of Jars site seemed to be competing with the war points of interest e.g. Bomb crater from US bomb circa 1970. I felt more interested in the war memories than the jars. I met the Aussie couple Billy and Trish the morning I left and they suggested that I use their airwaybill to fly my bike to Nepal. This was really uplifting because it meant I could probably cut the cost of flying the bike by a third.
Plain of Jars
After Phonsavan I rode out west to Sam Neau and the Veng Sai. By this time I’d been in Laos about 10 days and I was really growing exhausted from the long long days on windy roads. I really wanted to find a phone to call Jacqueline too, but none of the towns seemed to have international dialing. I pushed on 6 hours to Sam Neau, went for a short ride to the War caves at Veng Sai in the morning and then rode another 6 hours to Vieng Thong for the night. It was on this stretch that I met Billy and Trish again. I rode another 6 or so hours the next day to UdomXai and finally found an international phone to call Jacq, but got cut off. I was starting to feel a bit sick of Laos, as great as it is, so I rode the next day to the border for an early-morning exit. The road alternated between brand new tarmac superhighway and incredibly bad development road. The worst stretch was about 2km of knee-deep, fine sand that had me fishtailing all over the place. It wasn’t pleasant and I spent some time swearing at the conditions. Murray knows what it’s like!
Wash me!
After a night on the Beer Lao, I crossed the border into Thailand feeling slightly worse for wear and happy to be on some flat roads again for a while. I made it to Pai and now I’m sitting back in this tourist town waiting to meet up with a friend of a friend. The next steps will be a ride to Chiang Mai, some bike maintenance and a flight to Nepal.
The last three weeks has been very mentally and physically draining. I’m getting the hang of just moving every single day for weeks on end, I’m loving it immensely, but it can be hard. It isn’t laugh a minute and to surrender a bit of manliness, I have cried a few nights along the way. All in all though I’m still having the time of my life.