There and back again

Anticipating a departure from the tourist track, our morning start time became a lunch start time as Brooke enjoyed a last real coffee and I had one of the best hot chocolates this side of the Pacific. Coffee has been one of the greatest points of difference between Thailand and Laos. In Thailand, you could count on drip coffee everyday, and could get espresso more often than not. Plus, the coffee tastes great. I am in no way a coffee aficionado, but the Thai people do something right when making their lattes. I think it's the milk, which I believe is also the key to the best hot chocolate in Laos. Any type of milk had been close to impossible to find in Laos. In Thailand, quarts of whole milk were available in their 7-11s, a mysteriously popular chain that seems to sell only packaged expensive crap, typically next door to a shop selling real food like papaya salad, sticky rice or freshly grilled meat for a fraction of the cost. However, we never found milk anywhere else so we'd occasionally patronize the Great Satan, and it always tasted great. I'm pretty sure the owner of this restaurant imported milk from Thailand to make hot chocolate and espresso drinks. Anyways, the rest of Laos serves up powdered three in one coffee, made with eleven percent coffee, fifty percent sugar and the rest non dairy creamer. Brooke says it serves to satiate the addiction but isn't that tasty.

Speaks for itself

All that being said, we were late leaving Phonsavan and needed lunch so we stopped at a street side sticky rice vendor, where we picked up some laab and sun dried pork. We ducked out of the wind behind a stone wall nearby, but were quickly called back by a group of nurses eating at the table next to the food cart. I'm not sure whether they were embarrassed by our eating on the ground, or were just being nice, but we ended up sharing our two meals. They added a surprisingly tasty dish made of river algae with pork bits steamed in banana leaf, and pounded fish jeow. This lunch would certainly fuel an afternoon of riding.

Street outside the guesthouse. Only the main roads were paved.

Once we finally got on the move, the wind mostly stayed at our backs as we dropped nearly three thousand feet, passing several pick up trucks whose beds were entirely taken up by single bull water buffalos. A parade of ceremonial dressed Hmong people walking down the road convinced us to stop an hour early, but apparently the festivities had ended, so Brooke and I took a walk through the very sleepy town.

This bomb damaged Buddha is all that remains of the former provincial capitol

Tiny Hmong kids cruising down the road

 Strangely, we shared our hotel with a Norwegian bike tourist named Daniel who had spent a week hanging out with a friend of ours from the Gibbon experience. This connection came up when we mentioned a Norwegian book our Gibbon friend had recommended - Min Kamp, or my struggle, by Karl Ove Knausgård, not to be confused with Hitler's similarly titled book. Daniel got the impression that Americans had become as obsessed with this odd 3500 page autobiographical novel of daily Norwegian life much as Norway itself has - after all the last two Americans he met wanted to talk about this book with him. When he said that, I knew that he must have met Cam, because what other American even knows about the Norwegian Mein Kampf.

Karl Ove Knausgård, not Daniel

Our next day had us scheduled to arrive at the Mekong after turning off the main highway onto a road that numerous people and trip reports had assured us was paved. Sadly, we passed the exit, since it was little better than a rutted Jeep track jutting harshly up the mountain adjacent to the road. Our reservoirs of dirt riding resolve depleted, we certainly were not going to attempt what appeared to be the worst road yet, so we rejoined the highway vowing to risk overstaying our visa before trying something like that.

Our turnoff. It only got worse going uphill.

Fortunately, fifteen kilometers down the road, a wonderfully paved road peeled off the highway south towards the Mekong. Unfortunately, within two miles evidence of landslides became visible on the road, and soon we were fighting a cloud of dust as trucks passed us on the gravel road which replaced the paved one for the next thirty kilometers.

No roadside drinking here

Luckily, the remaining fifty kilometers had been repaved or we might have been stuck between hotels at nightfall. There was even time to pull over and explore a giant limestone knob sticking out of the rice paddies, criss-crossed on the inside by a small network of caves. Tired from the 80 mile day, we pedalled a little while longer to the next small town, grabbed a quick dinner and handed our 60,000 kip (cheap even for Laos, about 7.50$) to the ten year old who apparently ran the only hotel.

Walking through the middle of the limestone pillar

Somewhere in central Laos, we are famous

Kids hanging out

Given the difficulties Lao roads occasionally threw at us, leaving the country came easily, with a tailwind that basically blew us the twenty miles into the ferry terminal and immigration center. Within five minutes of having our passports stamped, we (and our bikes) were motoring across the still fast flowing Mekong. On the other side, we dodged packages skidding down a metal ramp onto the ferry for the return journey, had selfies taken with seemingly every Thai immigration official, and were set free in the land of Siam.

Ready to go to Thailand

Immigration selfies, for some reason I'm channeling Zoolander

After a month in Laos, Thailand struck both Brooke and I as decidedly first world. Blazingly fast wifi exists on every block, cars are bigger and shinier, ice cream is readily available and obesity actually exists. However, we had a mission to blast south along the river, taking advantage of the first consistently flat riding this entire trip to cover some big miles. Riding through old oxbows of the Mekong led to some great scenery, and an unexpectedly cool stop at Wat Phoutok, a temple placed on a mesa above the plains with an elaborate system of boardwalks leading to the top.

Seems stable

We stopped for the night at a very pleasant Australian run bungalow on the shore of one of these oxbows, but already could feel the heightened toll taken by the increased sun and heat of the lowlands.

View from the front porch

The inlet bordering the village was filled with lotuses

Starting early the next day, we beat the morning sun crossing a Utah like area of high mesas and red dirt roads before getting baked by the noon sun on the pavement to Nakhon Panom. At the same time, I was finishing The Late Homecomer about the Hmong experience in the US, and had read about their time in refugee camps in the same area. The author had also been struck by the red infertile dirt. It seems like one of the tougher spots in Thailand to live.

Thank goodness it was still early

Random roadside sighting.

The drudgery of finishing a 140km ride at 3pm broke suddenly when a police car pulled from a side road 50 meters in front of us. Peering down the road, we heard thumping Thai pop music blasting from speakers mounted on a truck leading a pack of nearly one hundred bike riders! We slowed to let them pass, then happily let their draft take us the last twenty kilometers into town. It turns out they were on a three day, 400km tour of the area wats, so their ride ended at Nakhon Panom's largest wat, where we were offered copious amounts of bananas and watermelon in exchange for innumerable selfies.

This ended up being the high point of the city, which seems more business like than most Thai cities we've been in, with little tourist infrastructure apart from a riverwalk occupied by an incongruously bright Christmas / New year's display and a huge naga. The heat and monotony, while not entirely unpleasant, had left both of us missing the more varied Lao side, which was made even more enticing by the looming limestone cliffs across the river.

We did have a moment of total cultural confusion as we wandered the street talking, killing time and looking for a place to get a hair cut. We had seen a salon on nearly every corner, so it seemed an easy enough task. After coming across a brightly lit establishment with a Thai woman having her hair combed, Brooke went in to scout things out. We speak better Thai than Lao, and basic English is much more common in Thailand than in Laos, so communication is generally pretty successful. However, it appeared that both employees of the hair salon had trained only as stylists - the woman who actually cuts hair was in Bangkok and wouldn't be back for several days. Next door, the same scenario played out. A few doors down, the only occupant of the salon was a wild haired woman in Pokemon pajamas who looked she could have just been discharged from a psych hospital. Amused and confused, we kept walking and were given free samples of grilled pork intestine along with our sticky rice before finally finding another spot where I got my hair shampooed, washed and dried for five dollars while Brooke got a massage.

The riverside naga

Walking up the next morning, Brooke and I poured over the map of the region, and couldn't help but notice Vietnam's proximity, less than 150 road miles from the Lao city of Thakek across the river. Two weeks ago we dropped our planned crossing at Dien Bien Phu because of hill fatigue and the cumulative effect of multiple side trips which had put us three weeks behind schedule. We were still way behind our original (very provisional) schedule, but Brooke had uncovered numerous attractions on the Lao side, so within ten minutes of waking up we decided to end our 800km trek southward in favor of a deviation eastwards across the body of Laos and Vietnam to the South China Sea.

Laos beckons

Since Vietnamese visas take three days to process, we had some time on our hands. Given that we changed route the morning of Christmas Eve, we thought the hundred kilometer out and back trip to Thailand's most holy wat (which Brooke wrote about in her Christmas post) would be the best place to celebrate. With the short distance, Brooke could get a haircut during the heat of the day. The process - including shampooing, head massaging, and styling - took so long that Brooke had to stop them in the middle or else a nighttime arrival would be assured. In a final demonstration of Thai Lao differences, we were overtaken by two Thai road cyclists in Lycra, who we drafted all the way to the temple. As we reached the city limits, the leader slowly ramped up the pace, dropping his friend, but Brooke and I held resolutely (perhaps foolishly) onto his draft despite our bags and decidedly non-pro attire. Maybe we will be ready for racing in a few months ...

Doorway into the wat