As you may know, over two and a half weeks back I rented a motorcycle, together with my Canadian friend Britton (of Cambroadian fame) here in Vientiane. It was a simple 110cc Suzuki, four stroke, half automatic. A motorbike, but also known as a scooter. The one you see every Asian person driving here. They are as common in these countries as bicycles or cars back home.
It maybe sounds crazy to explore the remote northern parts of Laos on a scooter, but truth be told, the paved roads are in general very good, the distances manageable and spare parts and fuel not hard to come by. What did we do with our backpacks, you may ask? We just took them with us, you silly. Strap them on the back with some bungee cords.
There was only one problem: the rainy season. Driving on mountains through a raging thunderstorm is, to say the least, quite an exhilarating experience. Arriving with all your clothes wet, soaked or damp is not. Luckily, after a scavenging tour of the local market in the capital we found some water resistant tarp and raincoats (and some handy little motorcycle gloves, very useful against those sweaty palms). Funnily enough, only on the last two days did we encounter big rainstorms. At that point it didn't matter that much anymore.
We could have rented a 250cc dirt bike. Bigger, better and faster. And more torque, which means climbing the hills happens a lot quicker. Top speed is a lot higher too. But without a proper motorbike driver's license driving a dirt bike can be difficult. We just didn't want to take the risk.
Before we left we met up with a Dutch friend of mine, Lydia. Unfortunatly for her, she was at the end of a fanatastic seven months traveling and had to go back home soon. Setting off from Vientiane, the first couple of days we slowly climbed away up north. First stop, after a day on the bike, was Vang Vieng, a curious place in Laos. See, in the whole country you have a curfew. The people have to be in bed around 23:30 or 24:00. Bars, restaurants and clubs all close around that time and afterwards the streets are completely deserted. The capital Vientiane becomes a virtually ghost town.
Except for Vang Vieng, which has bombarded itself to a backpackers party town. It has some beautiful scenery, with magnificent karts mountains overlooking the river that flows through the place. You can explore caves, go kayaking or rafting. Or you can go tubing. An initiation rite for backpackers in Southeast-Asia. For a day it's a lot of fun.
Tubing means you float down a river sitting in a big inner tube of a truck or other large sized vehicle. But in Vang Vieng it means you start the day (or afternoon) drinking in rickety bars built close to the river. Then you float down to the next. This you will do for a couple of bars, until your pretty much shitfaced, and then you take a tuktuk home or continue tubing down the last, big stretch to the town. At the bars you have swings or slides or other contraptions that will catapult you in the dangerously shallow river. People have died there hitting rocks underwater breaking their neck or drowning completely drunk. What an inglorious way to go.
Vang Vieng is not Laos. But a lot of people think it is. Which is the shameful part of the place (besides the hordes of drunken Westerns staggering back after tubing shouting, fighting and throwing up). After the hangover, and feeling curiously dirty, we set off again. Another day of hard biking ahead.
From Vang Vieng we went to Phonasavan, home to the Plains of Jar. This day was one of the longest. First north and then east. We drove for at least 300 kilometers which took us eight hours along narrow, winding mountain roads. You see some amazing vista's and landscapes. In the end we just managed to arrive the moment the sun was setting. Exhausted and wasted we checked in.
The Plains of Jar are a bit mysterious. Three fields of clusters of massive jars made out of stone have been found around Phonsavan. They don't know what they were for, or who made them, or when. They're not that impressive either; just big and stony. The interesting part is the unsolved questions surrounding these objects.
Another interesting phenomenon in Phonsavan are the so called uxo's. Uxo's are UneXploded Ordnance – big bombs, cluster bombs (called bombies here), napalm cannisters, mines etc. They were dropped by the Americans during the Vietnam war. Laos was a integral part of that war and the strategy of both countries. North Vietnam used Laos to ferry supplies, men and weapons along the Ho Chi Min trail into South Vietnam. The United States bombed Laos to disrupt these supply lines and to attack the communist forces, both Vietnamese and indigenous Lao forces. The war escalated in the 60's into something called the Secret War which saw the communist victorious in 1975. A lot of people don't know that Laos, to this day, is the most bombed country in the world. And a lot of those bombs remain unexploded.
The next part of our trip took us in a loop through northern Laos. To name all the towns that we stopped along the way would only confuse you, my dear reader, but I want to give a rough overview of where we went. This was the part where we roughed it. Sleeping in primitive guest houses. Being on the road for hours on end. Just seeing amazing landscapes and passing through small villages. Children laugh and wave and you just have to keep constantly focused to evade the animals and potholes. No showers, no internet, no Western people, no bars with Falang food, no VIP buses. Only Beer Lao and noodle soup.
I would suggest you look at a map of northern Laos now to make things easier. After we left Phonsavan we traveled further east (towards the Vietnamese border). Then we went up north again. At a small place called Nam Neum (with one functioning, very simple and primitive guest house) we took the road west. We managed to do this stretch of road in two days until we got to our first outpost of the backpacker banana pancake trail again, Nong Kieaw. There we took a boat north.
Five hours on a river with no human being in sight. Pretty cool, huh? We got to a place called Muang Kham. This is the furthest north we got, in a stretch of Laos, wedged between Vietnam in the west (around the same longitude of Hanoi) and China in the east.
We traveled on the road west and then south to a place called Oudomxay. Funny enough, according to the road map we had, a couple of stretches of road were unpaved. Unpaved means dirt, huge stretches of road missing, potholes and in general very hard conditions to drive. You can go maybe max 30 km/h. But, lucky us, all those little dotted lines on the map were just recently paved, the tar still smelly and sticky, the road in perfect condition. After Oudomxay we went on a beautiful stretch of national highway to Pak Beng, a river town on the Mekong, another stopover in the banana pancake trail.
I can't recall if I talked about the banana pancake trail before, but let me explain: the trail is not one set route, but towns, villages or sights that everybody sees on their backpacker travels through Southeast Asia. In this region, you don't really travel, you just move yourself from one place to the next. And every backpacker place has restaurants or bars where you can get your favorites Western food from back home. Yup, that's right, the banana pancake.
Anyways, we took the riverboat from Pak Beng to Luang Prabang. This is a very popular way for fellow travelers to enter Laos from northern Thailand. It takes two days from the border. The first stopover is in Pak Beng. The second day (the stretch that we did, with the bikes tied down in the front of the boat) it takes you to the beautiful and relaxed town of Luang Prabang, a World Heritage Sight.
And there we met up with my Dutch friends (well Dutch and French) Lize and Romain. The last time we were in a foreign country, we were all studying in South Africa. It's been a couple of years and I have seen them far too little according to my own taste, but with determination and a bit of luck we managed to catch up with each other in Luang Prabang. They are here on a three week holiday and we were more that happy to show them around a bit.
The four of us went on a two day trekking hike through the countryside. There we stayed at a Lao family, got ridiculously drunk on Lao-Lao (locally brewed whiskey), rode an Elephant and washed them and then kayaked back. Especially the elephant part was a lot of fun. There is nothing stranger than sitting on the back of a pachyderm, who than ambles over to the river, walks in, goes under and sprays you with water. The floating elephant feces though, were a little bit unsettling and distracting.
The story almost comes to an end. After Luang Prabang we raced back down to Vientiane, with a stopover in that drinking hole Vang Vieng. After being on the bike for two weeks, we made it back. We left on the 3d of June and arrived back on the 19th. It took us 1800 kilometers, one broken bungee cord, a loose rear view mirror, two boat trips, one chicken run over, countless butterflies and kamikaze bugs genocided and, yes that was me, one bike crash on a extremely slippery mountain road during a rainstorm.
It took me hours to write this all down and get all the pictures selected and ready for the internet. That's one unfortunate consequence of not being “digital” for two weeks: a backlog of travel stories and photographs. I excuse myself for dumping so much information in one mammoth entry, but I hope it was worthwhile (if you made it all the way). Enjoy!
No better parting words to this blog entry than a little joke me and Britton had during our bike travels.
Destination? Unknown. Journey? Awesome!!!
