Short Version:
A whirlwind visit
to Laos completed. Good afternoon Vietnam.
Longer Short Version:
Last post, Lovely
Wife managed to whizz us through a week or so of hard riding in about
the time it would've taken me to write about half a day. Now, a week
or so later, it's time for me to try – and fail, probably - to
replicate her brevity...
Long Version:
Luang Namtha to
Oudomxai (139.76km)
Nap. Massage.
Haircut. Night Market (chicken feet). Indian food. Sleep.
...and then up and
ready for ride day 7, which will see us do our second-biggest day
yet, at around 115km. Unless we get lost and do an extra 25km, in
which case this will turn out to be our biggest day yet. If we're
observant, though, the detour won't prove a total loss, as we'll get
to see... ummm... an abandoned rubber factory! Hoorah!
Misty, chilly, damp
morning: good for riding, not so good for camera lenses.
We hit the main
road into Laos from China mid-morning, and discovered pretty
instantly that the Chinese have much larger and more expensive cars
than the Laosfolks do, and are no better at parking them when in Laos
than they are when in NZ. Worth noting at this point that vehicles in
Laos come in 3 flavors:
Motorcycles/scooters,
which are used for carrying up to 5 people and/or goods up to and
including a refrigerator;
Toyota Hilux
utes (NAmerikans, this is the equivalent of the Toyota Tacoma
pickup, like Janine's blue one) in silver or occasionally black,
used for transporting half-elephants and giant snakes and amounts of
people and stuff up to and including however much only bends the
laws of physics a little bit;
Enormous
trucks, which are often empty.
We'd eyed Nam Or as
a potential overnighter if the 115km was looking like too much, but
we were there for lunch, which we ordered by miming eating and then
sitting back to see what emerged (noodle soup, of course!).
And then we rode up
a hill.
For 13km.
Luckily, it was a
gentler slope than our earlier Laos mountain encounters had been, and
the first half of the climb was shady and breezy so we were only a
little bit revolting by the time we crested and started to fly down
the other side. Again, the gradient wasn't that steep, so nothing
past 57km/h this time. Did pass a truck, though, which surprised the
bejeebers out of the driver (that's an assumption based on facial
expression. And how DO you say bejeebers in Laotian, anyway?).
Throughout the day,
we'd been passing through single-product villages (some of which were
perched on ridgelines and had incredible views): corncobs, marrows
(with a marrow-sized dog curled up asleep at the base of the enormous
pile like a furry caramel-colored marrow that twitched like it was
chasing smaller marrows in its dreams), cucumbers, watermelons,
pumpkins... each vegetable had its very own village that sold nothing
else.
And then Oudomxai,
with its loud bars at the north end of town, and its
fashionably-dressed young people, and its Litthavixay Guesthouse
(where we took the room with the bathroom big enough to accommodate a
person instead of the one where you could use the shower, toilet, and
basin all at the same time if you wanted but you probably couldn't
not use them all at the same time if you didn't) and Kanya's
Restaurant with the delicious foods (fried ginger with beef – that
had more ginger than beef – and purple sticky rice, yum), the weird
supermarket with its exterior gang of young thugs who turned out to
be English language students who really appreciated the opportunity
to try out their English on an English-speaker, and the park with the
lit-up trees and the several other groups of cycle tourists who
Janine spoke to but I didn't because she's nicer than I am and then
we went to bed.
Oudomxai to
Muang Khoua (107km)
One of those days
where nothing goes quite to plan: the cereal we'd bought turned out
to be a tiny portion – we'd been deceived by the size of the
package, never suspecting that it would also contain a carton of UHT
milk. The eating spot we'd chosen based on intertubes research, at
the foot of a statue on top of a hill with a good view, turned out to
have no statue and sufficient cloud to have no view either. Then the
second breakfast we decided to eat when we got back down the hill
comprised a bland omlet (sic), coffee so bad neither of us
could drink it, and a banana pancake that was burned on the outside
and sludge in the middle. And then the 85km ride to Muang Khoua
turned out to be 107km. Rats!....Speaking
of which... no, that story has to wait as it happened a few
days later. Remind me.
The ride, after the
first 20km or so, descended along a river valley, and was pretty easy
going. Just as well, because we were a) really bloody tired from
riding 140km the previous day, and b) really bloody demoralised by
the fact that someone on the intertubes had lied about how far it
was. We rode through lots of villages. Kids waved. Etc. Bah humbug.
Stopped for lunch
at a town at a bridge. Huge market day in progress, with lots of
traditionally-garbed ethnic folks in attendance. There was a small
boy with a tailless rat-thing on a leash. But that's not the rat tale
either. Remind me later.
Reached Muang
Khoua, found no rooms available at our preferred guesthouse so tried
our second option and got what turned out to be the last room: when we
emerged a short while later into the “we now want to go somewhere
and eat delicious foods” downpour, a sign had appeared by the front
door. It said:
Sorry. Has full already.
Winding, narrow
alleys awash with rainwater led us to the balcony of the Nam Ou
Guesthouse and Restaurant, where we drank a well-deserved BeerLao
each (and then a second, less-well-deserved one) and ate delicious
foods and chatted to our Belginian friends from Vieng Phouka, who had
arrived while we were BeerLaoing, and watched the river illuminated
periodically by the flashes of lightning and had to shift tables to
avoid the downpour that was coming in sideways and also through the
roof directly above where Lovey Wife was sitting. The Belgicans
regaled us with their camera-finding tale; the short version being
that once they had found the correct bus station, waited for the bus
driver to finish his lunch, accompanied the bus driver back to his
home, and had some tea on his deck... he presented them with their
camera. Which he had never once told them that he actually had.
Then we went home
to bed, and slept really soundly, despite the ongoing storm.
Muang Khoua to
Muang Khoua (0km)
Rest day!
On our itinerary it
said “Nothing special happens today.”
This was not
strictly true, because it was the umpteenth anniversary of Lovely
Wife's birth, and I'd been hauling some sneaky treats around in my
bags for a while, and so she ate cake in bed and received “Strange
Taste Horse Beans” but we didn't eat them yet until days later when
we were REALLY HUNGRY.
Was quite nice to
be not riding, because we were tired and because it was raining. Out
for breakfast instead? Why yes, let's!
First recommended
breakfast option don't actually serve breakfast. Curse you,
internets!
Second recommended
breakfast option was not found by the time we reached too-hungry
point, so we stopped at somewhere else with an over-river balcony and
ordered foods, which turned out to be entirely acceptable, except for
the coffee, which wasn't.
Wandered down to
the boat ramp at the bottom of the road – saw second-best breakfast
place two doors down from where we'd eaten - to see if we could see
info about the river crossing for tomorrow, but the only info was
about the downriver trip to Nong Khiaw; this was the boat we'd seen
our Belgiumers boarding as we'd snarfed down eggy goodness and a
baguette, which the menu said would come with cheese and gnam, which
we'd thought might be ham but turned out to be jam. And there was no
cheese either, unless maybe there was and Lovely Wife ate it all.
Then we went back
to our guesthouse, changed to a better room, with a better bathroom,
and went back to bed.
Post-nap, we
wandered around, stocking up on snacks for tomorrow's ride – we did
not purchase any of the cooked rats that were available (speaking of
which... no, wait, not yet) - and querying our indeterminate-gender
guesthouse host about how to leave town. Maybe worth mentioning here
that everything we'd read about departing Muang Khoua en route
to Vietnam talked about getting up stupidly early, crossing the river
in the dark on a small, leaky boat with a shouty man driving it, then
either riding uphill for one or two days or walking a long way to get
to the bus which – if not already departed - then took a long time
uphill on a shit road and crossed a number of rivers to get to the
border, where there were some hours of officaldom involved in getting
out of Laos, and then some more to get into Vietnam, and then a
near-unrideably bad road downhill to Dien Bien Phu, where there
aren't many places to stay but there are buses that go elsewhere.
When we asked, though, our
indeterminate-gender guesthouse host told us to go across the bridge.
The Welshman-from-Canadialand told us to go across the bridge. The
Tourist Information Office was closed, and then open but unattended. Best guess says they would have told us to go across the bridge.
Unfortunately,
Muang Khoua is built at the junction of two rivers, and the bridge in
question crosses the wrong one.
So we went and had
a beer and ate some delicious foods and watched a really impressively
large and dense swarm of bugs congregate around each of the
fluorescent lights, and then we went home to bed, figuring that we'd
see where the bridge took us in the morning.
Muang Khoua to
Dien Bien Phu (107km)
Woken several times
in the night by thunder and attendant deluge.
Bit worried about
the 100+km ride on the shitty road, not to mention the boat trip.
At actual get-up
time the rain was much lessened, but electricity there was not, so
noodly breakfast there was not, so we mixed cans of pre-mixed instant
coffee with protein powder and used that to wash down our daily
cocktail of anti-malaria drugs, vitamins, and prophylactic ibuprofen
before setting off into the no-longer-raining grey morning, across
the bridge, which led to another bridge, which took us across the
right river.
Schoolkids were out
and about, which meant lots of incomprehensible comments and
giggling, and then we were away from town and enjoying 10km of
rolling river valley.
Then we enjoyed
10km of mid-grade uphill.
Then we enjoyed
more 10km of mid-grade downhill, and 20km of rolling terrain, and
another 10km of mid-grade up.
And then we had 7km of filthy steep
uphill filth, in the filthy hot sun, through filthy villages full of
filthy villagers who had automatic weapons strapped to them and who
gave us filthy looks and so we hurried as much as we could to get
away from them but it really was quite steep and their cycles had
motors on them so they could easily have caught us if they'd wanted
to but they obviously didn't because we made it to the Laos border
station unmolested and the border people were having their lunch so
we had to wait for them to finish eating before we could leave the
country and there were a number of people ahead of us in the queue
and when the border guys reopened their little sliding window thing
they all got processed and then just when it was almost our turn a
bus arrived and the people started to push in front of us and I
called one an arsehole and stabbed him with my pen and the border guy
yelled something and all the people got out of the way and he took
our passports off me and stamped them and then we left Laos and we
didn't even pay the 5000 kip that the sign said we were supposed to
pay and that's like 60c but we didn't feel very guilty and then there
was 6km of not-Laos and not-Vietnam and that was cool because that
means there are no laws and we can do what we want but then so can
everybody else and maybe we should hurry to Vietnam where there are
laws to stop people killing us and taking our stuff and throwing our
bodies over that cliff into that ravine, to be food for rats.
Rats? Yes, let's...
Throughout the
first part of the day, we had, as usual, passed through lots of
villages. As usual, most of these comprised a lot of fairly
rudimentary but well-made woven-walled, thatched-roofed huts, many of
which had satellite dishes attached. In most villages, there were
people doing things, and in most villages some of these people would
stop what they were doing before we biked into their vicinity, and
smile and wave at us as we breezed through. This was especially true
of children, who often ran towards the road in order to have their
waving seen better, and to get a better look at us, and to say “bye
bye” or less-often “hello” or “thank you.”
In some villages,
though, we got stared at, with no smiling.
And in a few of
those villages, the staring and the general atmosphere were... kind
of creepy.
The village with
the automatic weapons just before the top of the last Laos hill was
one of these villages. There was another one, earlier in the day,
that had had a similar feel to it, but it wasn't until we stopped for
a snack atop a pile of concrete telephone poles that I learned that,
as I'd blasted on through as fast as my wee legs would take me, I'd
missed seeing a rat feast in that particular creepyville... and I
don't mean rats sitting around convivially gnawing on things.
Apparently the
villagers were sitting around an open fire, cooking and eating rats
on spits. In and of itself, not too terrible – we've eaten worse -
but combined with the feel of the place... ultra-creepy.
I should also
mention before we move onto Vietnam that the views during the climb
were stunning.
The Vietnam border
was less-populated with entry/exit petitioners than the Laos one, and
much more heavily guarded, by which I mean there were about 15
uniformed men sitting around outside doing not-much compared to the
one guy in the little booth at the Laos border. There were also two
uniformed men inside the grandiose building, one of whom graciously
allowed us to enter the country, just like our pre-arranged visa said
we could. He told us about Vietnamese history, and how glorious it
was, and graciously offered to change moneys for us at a very
favourable exchange rate I'm sure, and told jokes at which we laughed
and then his underling sneezed in a very loud and startling way and
we all jumped and then laughed and then we rode off down the hill, in
Vietnam, which is really Viet Nam, which means something like
“Country to the South (of China),” which means it's a little bit
like the South Island of New Zealand or like the South of the USAnus
or like Tasmania, only the people here only have five digits on each
hand.
The road down the
hill was as bad as we'd been led to believe, although the intertubes
commentator who said that you needed a full-suspension mountain bike
to ride it was a lying anusface. We enjoyed the downhill, despite the
worrying about whether the racks were going to be rattled right off
the bikes, which has already happened once, at much lower speed and
on much-less-rough terrain... suggest not using Puppet Installation
ServiceS for your cycle-touring setup.
And then flat land,
and a lot of traffic, and bright bright green rice fields, and A LOT
OF TRAFFIC and then Dien Bien Phu and statues and a guesthouse and a
bus ticket for the morning and food and beer and sleep.
The next morning I
fell off the roof of a bus, but you have to wait til next time to
hear about that.
