Completing our visit to Laos. Northing really bad to report other than the roads.
17th January 2006

Ever northwards
Luang Prabang, tranquil and stylish
Signs disappear so we use the force
Route 13 ceases to be lucky
Luke Earthrider
God bless Mr Macadam, inventor of quality travel

Phonsovan to Luang Prabang

We’ve still got to experience those perfect scenes of Asian karst scenery with puffs of cloud clinging to the sides of the valleys. The early morning start from Phonsavan didn’t yield the beauty we’d expected. I really don’t know how people catch those perfect photos. I guess in just the same way that Sjaak has shown us - patience and a good eye. The patience required here means waiting for weeks on end until nature does her stuff. Knowing our luck we’d have forgotten to wind the film on or not charged the batteries.

The riding was spectacular, just as before, and other than the clattering of Berthette’s overworked heart and the continuing drizzle of oil from her shock absorber all was right with the world. Back on route 13 the traffic increased and the incessant frantic waving of excited, friendly children reduced to the odd casual wave from a pedestrian acknowledging our presence. Was it that we had left behind the villages of the Hmong people or simply the nonchalence of people accustomed to seeing larger amounts of diverse traffic hooning past. The Hmong people are reputed to be nasty, horrible, warlike folk, by the way (recruited by the yanks for their secret guerilla army, no less) and these were the very ones who had been so beautiful and friendly. Guess it depends which end of a gun barrel you’re standing at. I’m sure the Gurkas are wonderful homeloving, family types but don’t call one’s bluff.

Mr X in Phonsavan had told us of his suspicions over the supposed hijacking of a bus in 2003 by Hmong villagers. Still today buses come accompanied by an armed guard, couldn’t fit one on the bike though. There was something very fishy about the official report. It was a bus Laod of Hmong villagers who were attacked, the reason was supposedly robbery. But something doesn’t ring true. Would Hmong people really attack their own, and with the option of more lucrative tourist buses passing through it seems unlikely that robbery was the motivation. Mr X. feels it was a set up to discredit the Hmong people who are generally unhappy with their treatment by the government. I ought to elaborate, the Hmong women have been famed for centuries for their skills in growing opium, and although it is a a large cash crop in Laos it is officially frowned upon. In an effort to monitor the Hmong activites better, the tribes people were encouraged to move out of the remote hills and to land near the roadside, in exchange for schools and health care. The roadside land is steep and hard to cultivate for even legitimate foodstuffs, the schools and health care have not materialised and understandably many of the villagers are now moving back to the hills. The government is not happy, and Mr. X feels that the recent ‘attacks’ were set up to undermine Hmong support. And certainly, our heartwarming reception of choruses of greetings and seas of cheery waving people, it seems unlikely that they would attack their own people.

After watching the video of the Secret War before we left the welcoming waves brought tears to my eyes. They had all the reason in the world to be distrustful of foreigners, and yet we were receiving some of the warmest welcoming faces of the trip so far. These people deserve better than the world has dished them out.

All in all it was a short day to Luang Prabang which gave us ample time to sample each and every hotel and rate their rooms and prices before making a snap decision. So we stayed at the first one we looked at. No regrets; lovely friendly hosts, spotless quarters and no more expensive than we’d heard the rest of town was. Okay so we paid nearly double the rate of anywhere else in Laos, Cambodia or Thailand but this is a hugely popular World Heritage site where they can fill the rooms at any rate. I can hear former-Webmaster Will chuckling at this point that we are suddenly begining to understand free-market economics. Funny that we should accept it here in a so-called communist country. I think the point is that even at this hugely inflated rate we were still only coughing up four quid a night. We can stand it.

Maybe it wasn’t such a bargain, in the middle of the night we smelt burning, it was the shower unit, it was overheating. We looked in all the obvious places for a main switch to disable it, before it burst into flames, but nothing. The night guard was sweet, but with no common language we seemed at a loss to get across the urgency of the matter. He was unhappy about rousing his boss, but we bullied him into it. The manager arrived sleepily and had obviously just thrown on enough clothes for decency and shuffled over. He seemed unfazed but at least knew where the trip switch was. He would move us in the morning. The smell of burning pervaded the room, but we were out of immediate danger. In the morning he promised to fix the shower, we would not need to move rooms. Oh dear.... generally fixing in developing countries is muntering by another name. Hoping to fix a potentially inflammable shower unit by bodging a couple more twisted wires together, did not seem like a good plan.

I am humbled. Whilst we ate breakfast and luxuriated in the wi-fi connection (hard to believe - someone hereabouts is all techy but short of password knowledge) in the hotel, a completely, new shower unit was fitted in the room. It worked and it turned off when we wanted it to. We were thoroughly impressed. The guy said he was going to fix it and he did, and he did it properly. I hope he goes far.

A deserved World Heritage Site

Luang Prabang deserves its reputation; beautifully positioned on a peninsular formed by the confluence of a minor river joining the Mekong, a hummock rising in the centre of town covered with monasteries, wats and stupae and a main drag of French-colonial influenced building of no little architectural merit. The only real downside is the touristification of the main street. Every building has a large sign board in front of it displaying it’s function; high speed internet, restaurant, hotel, massage (all thoroughly decent, here), gift shop or simply purveyors of film and digital processing. By night the signs become less noticeable as the vendors of souvenirs transfer the entire contents of their covered stalls in the day market to take occupation of this main thoroughfare. It made a refreshing change to see only one or two stalls selling ‘Beer Lao’ t-shirts.

I must bang on for a moment about traveler fashion. If you want to stand out from the crowd do not buy any of the following products:- Tiger Beer t-shirt (Singapore), Chang Beer t-shirt (Thailand), Lao Beer t-shirt, any football shirt other than that of the club from your town of birth (or nearest Premier league club if you live in Cornwall), anything made by Billabong or Quicksilver or a pair of ‘fishermen’s pants’ in Thailand. Much respect to my nephew Richard who correctly identified the fake Rolex watch as the defining souvenir in Bangkok. I digress. You can of course, be like us and instead of wearing the generic traveler uniform, look like Mr. and Mrs. Square and hide your traveler experiences under a bushel or two.

Given the proportionately high number of monasteries in the town, there is a corresponding density of monks. For the early riser, the monks doing their rounds collecting alms is quite a surreal experience. Echelons of saffron robed religious dudes in parties of five to a dozen walk briskly around town only slowing their pace to have their bowls added to by well meaning citizens who thereby gain ‘merit’ (nirvana brownie points). Hippy manfully (can a charming elegant lady do things manfully?) rose to the task of a twilight rise to see this daily event take place. It did not feel manful at all. I do not respond well to early rises, and although my body was apparently functioning, I felt fuzzy and nauseous, my ability for conversation was neglible and my decison making deranged. But to outward appearances I was walking and dressed in suitable attire, though manful I was not. We knew we were getting close to the zone when we started getting accosted by vendors peddling rattan baskets full of sticky rice and folded banana leaves full of something else. We were in two minds as to whether to join in with the alms giving. As non-Buddhists, is it patronising to join in a ritual with religious significance? After due consideration (in fact more being caught at a weak moment while half asleep by a hardselling vendor) we bought a few bits, knelt at the side of the road and added our calories to the bowls of the monks. The purchase left a bit of a sour taste; normally a portion of sticky rice would be around 3000 Kip in a restaurant and this opportunist old hag was asking 20,000. We managed to get this down to 10,000 which she most ungraciously accepted. It just seemed so wrong to be being stitched up to give something to a religious order that really was irrelevant to us. I hope that this kind of extortion gains demerit points. If my mouth and mind had been functioning properly I would have been more forthright, but she has obviously learnt to capitalise on the fuzziness of farangs unaccostumed to dawn rises.

The monk culture is also a kind of welfare state. In a countries where birth control seems to something they only apply to chickens, there are obviously a number of young men unable to make a living. So it is quite normal for one of the sons of a family to join an order, and instead of being on the dole, as he may in western society, he is revered and someone his family can be proud of. The giving of alms, by local people makes them people feel good and the monks get fed. It all seems a more dignified way of going about things.

Amongst other must-do activities in Luang Prabang is an evening stroll up the hillock in the middle to catch the sunset. Regrettably this is another event widely publicised in the Lonely Planet. I feel justified in going as I don’t generally read the guide and just went on a whim. The other sunset worshippers passed the time waiting for the inevitable decline of the sun by sitting in lines perusing the pages of their ‘South-East Asia on a Shoestring’. There was a bit of quiet sunset photo rage from a couple of Germans in front of us as their pole position turned to nothing when a North American with an array of cameras climbed in front of the barrier and obscured their hard fought view. Hippy was all for bailing out but I just had to join in the fracas ‘cos we were there’. Not the greatest sundown of all time but a few golden moments such as the Japanese tourist who obviously got fed up with trying to elbow his way to the front and resorted to capturing images of lines of tourists instead. Probably the most apposite way of remembering the moment.

The other must do, is Tad Kuang Si. The Tad should have given away this is one of those waterfall-type things. There was a choice we could have gone North to see a cave, or South to the waterfall. We chose South, Pat did not complain but I felt we had made the wrong choice when the surface of the road degenerated to bumpy dirt, with the shock absorber bleeding it’s oil everywhere and no hope of a new seal before Bangkok maybe 70km of extra unnecessary dirt road was unwise. Anyway we went.

It was pretty. A 3-tiered jobby, with terraces of accommpanying turquoise pools. We took the steep walk up to the top, with a few other travellers. There were the quaint hand painted warning signs to not step over the edge. I ponder what type of people who need to be told that this is dangerous, but as if reading my thoughts I was provided with an illustration in front of me. An Isreali guy was nonchalently, leaning against a branch with his feet bracing him at the edge of the drop. The branch gave way; the feet slid forward; my heart missed a few beats....... his feet braked against a limestone knoll on the crest.... he was OK, a little damp but OK. It had been so close to disaster.

At the bottom we took a refreshing dip. The waterfall site had become something of a refuge for the confiscated quarry of poachers. Some orphaned Asiatic bears, and a couple of tiggers. The bears were so cute, their faces tapir-like with a fluffy mane-like collar. White noses gave way to thick jet black fur, they looked like the passive, younger cousins of the gruff grizzlys in North America. The plan is to return the bear and tiggers back to the wild, but with so much positive treatment by humans I can see them within weeks them trotting calmly up to the first poacher they see and being someone’s fireside rug.

We wanted to beat the farangs back to town. This was not out of some innate competitive spirit to be winners in an unofficial race, but something much less macho. Dirt road is simply much more conducive being the one in front and not continuously driving through the dustballs of the leaders. Not to mention the approaching gloom that camouflages the potholes that lie in wait to disconcert those that risk the twilight hours.

So, Luang Prabang. Done it. Of all of Laos as a single stop destination it certainly has it all - even treking and rafting adventures for the more athletic. Can’t help thinking about those bloody signs in the streets though. What they need is a good town planner and some guidelines.

Finding our way by feel

The road north from Luang Prabang is, inevitably, Route 13, which twists and turns and rises and falls over the crinkly bits between the rivers. Strangely, leaving LP and arriving at Nong Khiaw took us from the Ou river to the Ou river by way of some fairly high and almost thermal underwear-cool hills. Clearly the Ou passes through gorges where it is’s not practical to build roads. There is a river transport option available but we discovered later that the boats are tiny and cost 100 dollars to make the passage. Must be a stunning trip for those with more flexible travel plans.

By road, though, you get the benefit of seeing the villages along the way. A peculiarity of which is the ubiquitous conclave of blokes. Cambodia and Laos seem to have some kind of meeting going on in every other village, always men and their always having arrived on fleets of motorcycles. We mused at this point whether the ladies were away with the poppy fields and the gents discussing opium futures. It was less easy to see, as we were weaving through the villages, but there were groups of women at some houses usually with a bunch of young kids with them, in the fashion of an unofficial nursery. I would imagine that, as these countries are nominally communist, the chaps gather to make 2-week plans every now and then, while the women just get on with it because all men are made equal.... I actually get to notice this as the villages become rather slow moving, just so much other stuff passes me by as I’m gazing at the 30 feet in front of me waiting for a cow to change course. I believe the scenery was wonderful again although overly cloud-shrouded for photographing. Northern Laos seems to be devoid of road signs of any sort; for once we were not just bewildered by the alien font. This in itself is not a problem as most of our maps are pretty good about giving distances between junctions. This was one of those days were distances became random compared to physical features. Route 13 has an excellent set of milestones that confirm that the town you want is still ahead. Even these disappeared. The signs advertising the names of towns as you entered them bore absolutely no resemblance to those on our map. It seems, and I cannot give any reason for I know none, that pretty much every town in these parts has multiple names and they are all current unlike the Byzantium/Constantinople/Istanbul phenomenon. There are few main roads and we happily turned down the only paved one on offer which took us where we wanted.

Nong Khiaw (even this has several different names at each end of the 80 metre bridge spanning the Ou) is a major setting off point for treking and river cruising (not sure that cruising really sums up the vessels on offer) to visit small villages and to observe traditional cultures fairly intact. The village has a grand array of bungalows catering for folk coming to town to make their arrangements. We arrived in good time and did check out the options for once. I could tell that things were not so good when Hippy kept coimng back from a recce and suggested moving on. The favourite sounding place had been filled already and had a swinging party for locals going on. Shame they had no rooms as I had immediately struck a chord with them when I gyrated up to the door in time to their ghetto blaster. So it was that we ended up paying a whole 3 dollars a night rather than the 2 dollars that we could have got away with elsewhere. It was an excellent choice. The managent in the shape of George and his family were the epitome of efficiency and knew exactly how to be there when you wanted them without being in your face.

As we checked in we met up with a Swede who was delighted to have recovered his bicycle. He’d been in town three weeks before having cycled up from Bangkok on an old racer he’d bought for forty quid. Faced with the 100 dollar trip down the river, he and some other guys he’d hooked up with decided to buy an old fishing boat and fLaot their way down to Luang Prabang. On the first evening they’d pulled up to the river bank to camp and in the morning his bicycle had disappeared. The trip by boat was a failure although he was reluctant to fill us in on exactly what had happened. On arrival back in Nong Khiaw he’d spotted a youth riding down the street on his bike and managed to collar it back again. He was remarkably calm about it although he did confess to swearing at the youth at length in German. We agreed that this an excellent language to express anger in. Now his bicycle is decorated with stickers of scantily clad women and most of the requisite parts for touring, like the rack, had been stripped off.

Rather than taking a trek we got our cultural education from the town itself. This part of the country did not suffer from the US carpet bombing raids and so we were much amused to find a couple of young lads playing with an amunition box just as most children enjoy playing with any kind of box. Much more durable than cardboard. I did notice though that these boxes would make great metal paniers for the bike. Maybe though it would create an awful lot of grief at customs checks.

Pretty much a first in the world for us, but the male sector of the population in much of Laos is actively involved in childcare. Young lads can be seen carrying siblings around and fathers are often spotted cleaning or nursing the bairns. Down at the river there were little clusters of chaps who were washing clothes. We can’t be sure if they were bachelors with no choice in the matter or family men pulling their weight but I really cannot remember having seen chaps laundering anything other than motorcars and bikes anywhere else. Most unexpected. Maybe this thing about the women being great cultivators has enforced a role reversal from the norm. Of course, if there’s a mechanical contraption that needs taming the men have absolute command. Some things never change.

Other than tourism the town appears to generate its wealth form some kind of tree bark. When we arrived the sides of the street were covered with the stuff. Later in the evening, seemingly under cover of darkness, a Chinese truck was being loaded with the frayed wood matter. When we asked around what it was, folk got all defensive.
“It all goes to China and Vietnam” - with not a word of explanation.
“It’s a kind of medicine” - sounded plausible, but no one knew what it might be a medicine for.
There’s an odd American in town running a ‘right on’ Laos silk shop (more of this in a minute) whose lao wife reckoned that it was the bark of the paper tree that is used for making ..... paper - the nice rough papyrus type material much favoured in these parts for making lampshades. Hardly any need for the tight lips if that is the case unless the harvesting is being done illegally and without thought of sustainability. We are none the wiser.

Back to MarkO Bartholomew (for that is how he pretentiously writes his name -reads like a dubious alias to me) and his silk business. Having been the man to run the first tours in Bhutan and subsequently written a definitive text on textiles of the Himalayas, he has settled in Laos with the mission of promoting Lao silk weaving. His wares were by no means cheap and this was partly justified by the notes appended to information boards which informed us that part of the revenue went to help clear bomb matter and some for training of weavers. There not being any figures quoted as to how much was being redistributed, we were immediately skeptical. I hope we are completely wrong and that he does support these important causes. We were rather confused about the concept of supporting traditional weaving, too. He was keen to point out to us those weavings that had been produced to his designs and pointed out that a well known shop (not well known to us!) in Vientiane was doing just the same and knocking out the results for large sums of money. Smacked of jumping on the bandwaggon to me. He also has a fancy bungalow that he rents out for 100 dollars per night. We didn’t go and see it but it must be pretty special to be 50 times as expensive as the other bungalows in town. Then he started moaning about the fact that the Lao government is starting to collect taxes. How dare they. We’d had enough and made our excuses. We did promise to put a link to his web site so there you are.

Somehow, I don’t hold out much hope for him to get much suitable passing trade. He is in an out of the village down a grotty little dirt lane leading to a bunch of budget guest houses. Hardly, the location to attract the sort of customer that will lay out a $100 on a scarf. But maybe he knows the business better than us.

He did educate about Bhutan though. We already knew it has taken the policy of limiting tourism to people willing to spend a lot of money, which stops the country being overrun by tourist culture and ensure they cut a big slice of the tourist dollar. very astute. What we didn’t realise is that these funds are being ploughed back into the country’s public system. Nature reserves have enough funds to last them the next 20 years, hospitals are being set up, schools are being improved. I am impressed. May Bhutan stay Macdonalds free.

Much as the rest of Laos, even in this sleepy little backwater there is an “Indian” restaurant run by Pakistanis. They always use the “Indian” epithet as apparently it has more draw. Any way the Nong Khiaw branch of the Nazim chain served us up a perfectly acceptable repast of samosas, dhall makani and stuffed nan. Jolly good. One can tire of noodles after all.

The most charming couple of Yorkshire folk turned up at the hostel and we spent a good deal of time in idle chatter. In their late fifties, Roy and Janette have got switched on to the travel thing and are debating how best to go about it. They are pondering; if they can retire right now, whether to sell houses, or to keep them and rent them out, whether to travel by bicycle, motorbike, public transpot, landrover or camper van, whether to travel for ever or just take big chunks, whether to settle in one area for a period or just keep going. How difficult to have to make so many decisions but how wonderful to have so many options. I hope our sage(?) words do not point them in a particular direction and they then blame us for a nightmare journey some place. Honestly, are the folk that have the perfect attitude to their lives; that they want to make a plan that can cover all the options and then go out and enjoy themselves. Why not?

As we left Nong Khiaw, it happened. At last, a little example of the hill hugging fluffy white splendour we’ve been hoping for. This was set to be a wonderful scenic riding day........

The start of the sting in the tail

Until the road changed into a white road on the map. White is not good. We had been concerned about this road to the border for a while and had been quizzing people who had been down it. It’s hopeless though unless you get to speak to another overlander, people simply don’t register the salient characteristics of the road. Backpackers on a bus only notice if it is bumpy or dusty, try to ask them about the road surface itself and they are generally hopeless. We don’t care if it’s dusty, and a road can be bumpy because of potholes in a car that become irrelavant on a bike when you can weave round the holes. We want to know about soft sand, if there mud, are there corrugations, is there loose rock on the surface. These things people don’t know.

It is only 200km from Luang Nam Tha to the border but we had allowed ourselves a few days to do, so that if it was seriously awful we could still make it before our visa runs out.

Luang Nam Tha, is a chilled provincial capital. What am I saying, everything about Laos is chilled. Luckily, so far it is not one the ‘must do’ backpacker and tour guide map of the world, and doesn’t even have the pull of a famous set of ruins like Cambodia to draw in the crowds. It has only been open to tourists for less than a decade, so the Lao people are not yet sick of the sight of us. Many people come and use it as a transit route to Vietnam, only to discover by accident almost, that it is a seriously pleasant place in it’s own right.

It, like other Laos towns of it’s size, has an overhead public address system on the streets. We knew that the speakers played music, and had the spoken word. What we didn’t know was the purpose of the system. Was it merely something to entertain the troops, just taping into a local radio station, or did it have a more propaganda-type motive. It is in these situations that it would be useful to have a better command of the lingo, but instead we are left to question. Whatever it’s intent, I am sure that if you are one of the unfortunate souls with a speaker blasting next to your bedroom window, and you want a siesta, you must surely be tempted to encourage the fraying of a few wires. Just as I had been filled a destructive urge when speakers were preaching at me in a Nevada public toilet.

There is a fair sprinkling of tourists, resting their limbs after the road from Thailand and seemingly awaiting to go to somewhere more interesting. For no reason really, apart from a need to do some hand washing, the place having the hottest shower in seemingly years (solar powered you know) and to try and get a more realistic set of information about the next stretch of road - we stayed a day.

Fleetingly, a Singaporean motorbiker on a nice shiny new BMW, nipped in to have a chat, We saw him leave with an accompanying fleet of other shiny bikes the next morning on his way to Thailand. Clearly, we were a little too shabby for than passing perusal. Do we really care. I think not.

Round the world by motorbike - 5 years, bicycle - 9 months

Lingering here also had the fortuitous effect that we met Luke, the morning we left. Luke is a Kiwi/Brit who just arrived from China, on his bicycle, and was cutting through the corner of Laos into Thailand.

Luke puts our feeble travels to shame, in the last 9 months he has cycled 25,000 miles, he went through Tibet in temperatures of -20C (which personally is just plain crazy) and likes to average 200km a day. On his bicycle!! He is on the last leg of his trip having started on the West Coast of Canada he has gone East mostly. He will complete his trip around the world in about a fifth of the time of us. He will have averaged a bigger distance a day than us and only powered by his skinny pins. We were seriously humbled. He was probably not looking his best, sporting a rather nasty set of grazes on his face and nursing a broken rib, from a tumble in China.

One of the versions we had heard about the road ahead was that the first 80km was the worst with 3 river crossings. River crossing can be no more than a puddle with a perfect ford beneath or nasty deep murky water over loose large rocks - we wanted to allow ourselves plenty of time to deal with whatever the road would deliver us.

Scabby Luke (a monicker he seemed not to mind) left before us, and as we began, the road was really good graded dirt and we wondered how long this would last, or had the travel naive backpackers been exaggerating. We passed Luke. He caught up with us at a set of road works. Roads works in these parts involve dumping stuff on the road and then skimming it flat. Luke played the dumb tourist and pretended to not understand and weaved around the dozer and wheeled through the shrapnel. We could see his point, he could not afford to waste an hour of daylight if he wanted to complete the road ahead, that in all likelihood was going to get worse from now on, not better. As the grader did it’s skimming, we smiled as a pair of overly impatient 4x4s followed it, only to have to revese back over the rubble when the dozer went for a second run.

The river crossings were three just as an Israeli in Phonsavan had promised and were very do-able, this being the dry season. Apart, that is, from the uncertain parts of steep damp clay through the hilly section where the suface was slithery enough to be disconcerting. In fact the riding was OK-ish and we thought we would take the time to at least capture on film some tasters of the road. At one such break a local old lady, walked by us, with apparently the hugest reefer soggily hanging from her lips. Her smile was wide; her greeting slurred, but well meaning. Her mind in her own nirvana, she ambled up the road. It is apparently, culturally the norm for the elderly in these parts to ease their old age with a little ‘medicinal’ help, be it opium or cannabis. To be honest if there is little in the way of a health service, is it really a terrible idea that the old get off-their-heads for the last few years. It is considered that they have contributed enough to the community and it is time to soften their way to the end of their lives. And is it really that different to us in the West dosing people up with a bunch of legal pain killers. Anyway, it makes for a refreshing change for the dope-heads to be the retired folk - shocking what the seniors get up to these days.

In fact, we made such good time, that when we arrived at Vieng Phouka our rest stop for the night by early afternoon, and felt slightly wimpy that we hadn’t decided to go the whole way to the border. But hey - why rush.

There was something a little fishy about our guest house. A petrol tanker drew up, the the girl of the house in a rather skimpy top (for Laos) rushed over. The driver handed her something that looked remarkably like a pair of knickers, she flirted and ran off.

OK, so we are staying in another brothel, but without this time the advantage of being able to replenish our condom stocks from the bedroom drawer. Come on there should be some perks to staying in such a place. Prostition is an inevitable byproduct of a bunch of transient construction workers, a coal mine close by, and convoys of truckers needing a break on a dirt road.

Luke rolled in with an hour or so of light left and we were set up for another evening enjoying British humour. At some point in the middle of banter a very tidy, young American, joined us. He had that look of a man trying to add a decade to his age by growing a beard (fair cop, we’ve all tried it), but it did little to mask his youth and the naivety of a gap year student having a jolly up on Mummy and Daddy’s allowance. The poor lad arrived when we were in mid flow of dry British humour, and he sat dazed and confused. He clearly, could not get into step with the pace of conversation, and by the look of him thought he had stumbled a set of travellers high on drugs. The truth was we were high in a way. It was a mutually, stimulating relief to be with others who understood Brit humour. Luke had had the strange combination of being partly reared in Alnwick just outside Newcastle, and partly in New Zealand. It is probably against a local by-law, in Geordy-land, to be humourless - an arrestable offence In fact, they probably banish you on a train to London, or force feed you with Peter Cooke or ‘Little Britain’ until you submit.

We should, I suppose, have adapted our conversation to include him, and we did try honestly, but it simply didn’t flow. He couldn’t follow us, and even on travel conversation he seemed totally lost when we mention more than one other country, with 2 syllables. I am sure he went away, thinking we were very strange and probably very rude, and possibly thought we were serious when we made jokes about unsavoury topics (sorry, unsavoury that’s that word that isn’t in the American dictionary). But he really needs a huge injection of a sense of humour.

Right to the border, this is theory anyway. The Israeli had suggested that this portion was longer but in better condition. Was he having a laugh! Thoughts of Ethiopia rushed back to us, steep undulating road with loosed rock beneath a layer of powdery concealing sand. It was horrible. Through the sand, it was impossible to see the surface below and be confident over the loose rough stuff. Our only consolation all the way to Huay Xai at the border was that we were having a shitty time, but Luke on his near standard ‘10-speed’ racing bike had it worse. The road was punishing, steep rocky climbs where it would be hard to get momentum and then worst still steep unstable rocky or slippery descends.

He had caught up with us a few km into the journey when the road was not too bad, at another set of road works. This time he waited with us as the digger above the road dropped boulders down; some so large that as they rolled over the edge their momentum took out full size trees. It was not the time for bravado. We made an arrangement to meet up in Huay Xai, and Luke planned to ride in the dark if necessary to make it. Now on the road, we wondered if he would make. He is clearly a very fit and determined guy, but this road surface in the dark may be too much.

A tell tale rutted section told of the muddy mess the road would become in the rainy season. Even now, in the dry, a truck had managed to get stuck. One problem was that with our back shock has now lost all it’s damping and the front forks are filled with slightly overly thick oil, and the bike fully loaded, on bumpy sections the bike went into un uneasy perpetual motion, undulating unstably back and forth.

Someone constructing this road has a very cruel sense of humour, in the middle of the fluffy, rocky section there was a section of about 5km of perfect tar. It was two thirds of the way to the border, and it was just long enough for even the most weary to begin to assume that could be good the rest of the way. Then just when you were beginning to relax and enjoy it the shit started over again. Who does that? It make sense to me to build a road from either end, especially if it cannot be accessed any other way.

On the way Pat was obviously fixated on the road surface a few feet in front of him, and was not in the mood for conversation about the scenery. So that left me to watch the world go by, by myself. The villages here have different customs and attire. There were some villagers in which it looked to the layman anthropologist as if they were wearing judo outfits in black with royal blue trim. Then there was the topless village. Here the women with children slung over their backs were bare breasted. (I was looking at the road as usual and Hippy failed to draw my attention to this) Makes sense to me in hot weather if you are breast-feeding to dispense with the complication of clothing. We passed by too quickly for me to see if this was a general feminine attire or just for those in the nursing phase. Fleetingly, I caught a glimpse of a few women in garb I had not seen before, selling something in plastic bags (do you know I am growing to despise the ubiquitous use of plastic bags) at the side of the road. Who they were and what they sold will remain one of those mysteries.

Reunited with tarmac

We arrived in Huay Xai, pink. Yes pink - not from the sun but from the fine dust. Everything was pink, the bike, our gear and our skin. Our arrival at our first choice hotel was met with the manager telling us aggressively that they were full. They did not look full, at all. I think our filthiness, was socially unacceptable. Instead we were welcomed by a charming Lao lady, whose hospitality was such that she showed no visible sign of being repulsed by our encrusted appearance, into her spotless shiny new hotel, and led up to a room with a beautiful view of the Mekong.

We checked that there was room for Luke if he made it and set about ensuring that he had a suitably large bunch of bananas and a couple of packets of biccies awaiting his arrival.

Luke made it, pink of course, and with hand cramp form gripping the brakes down hill. He had had a second fall, and rebruised his rib, but was generally OK apart from a voracious appetite. I cannot imagine how many thousands of calories were burned in that journey.

Earlier we had been insulted by the paucity of the portions at the reataurant over the road and knew the place was totally inappropriate to a man in need of refueling a starved system. We chose well.

Now Luke is a slender petite kind of a guy who by now after 9 nine months hard cycling has consumed every cell of fat. When a guy with such a morph orders and then consumes enough high calorie food to feed a family of five, waiting staff unconsciously gawp in amazement. The main courses would be followed by double portions of puddings. You could tell the staff had never seen anything like it. Each time they brought more food to the table they tried to share it equally between us three only to be dumbfounded when this lithe wee fellow said it was for him and then would steadily devour it. This man could swallow food for Newcastle.

We figured we all deserved a rest day. That evening, the restaurant, who were probably earning their monthly income from Luke’s sumptuous banquets made an attempt to outdo him - when he asked for a big bowl of rice with his meal, a mountain of rice arrived. They failed.

It seems odd to be writing with such great fascination about how much food someone should be getting through but we honestly began to wonder whether if the extra cost of his ‘fuel’ compared to our dining needs would add up to more than our average daily petrol bill. Maybe cycling is not the cheap travel option that we once thought.

I had arrived in Laos ignorant of its history and culture and am leaving very fond of a stunningly beautiful and gentle country, unbusied by traffic and tourists. I am again saddened by how rich governments terrorise countries that have little to fight back with, and in this case do not even have the decency to admit to their behaviour publicly. Laos is catching on fast to tourism, and I only hope it manages to reap in the tourist buck without losing the essence that make Laos a very special country. I am sad to be leaving.

.... and so to Tarland. Ooops, Thailand