Rats

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:

1. Motorcycles/scooters, which are used for carrying up to 5 people and/or goods up to and including a refrigerator;
2. 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;
3. 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.