Completing a quest and finding a new civilization

Hunting for snails around Sam Pan Bok

Both of us agree that the deviation from Thailand into central Laos and Vietnam had been well worth the effort. I'm sure interesting opportunities would have presented themselves if we had continued along the Thai Mekong path, but the only site I know of that I regret not having visited is a place called Sam Pan Bok, or Three Thousand Holes. It's an area on the Mekong only visible during the dry season. Here, the river narrows to its thinnest width since leaving China, earning it the vastly inappropriate moniker "The Grand Canyon of Thailand." . As water levels drop, thousands of eroded holes in the rocky riverbed are exposed, but remain filled with water well into the dry season. 

Taking a dip in one of the holes, with Thailand visible across the Mekong

Enough Thai tourists visit that I had been able to discover it on the internet, but despite a fair amount of effort, I found absolutely no information regarding this hydraulic oddity on the Lao side. However, looking at Google Earth, the same Swiss cheese pattern can be seen on both sides of the river about one hundred kilometers upstream from Pakse, so it was unclear what if anything made the Thai side more special than the Lao side. 

View from above

Uncovering the viability of visiting Lao Sam Pan Bok became a minor quest for me. I think I asked every English speaking hotel owner, tourist official and passerby if they had heard of the area, but universally received blank stares as answers. With this background, I found myself in Miss Noy's Motorcycle Rental, a popular spot among foreigners renting scooters for self guided Bolavean Plateau adventures. Mysteriously, Ms. Noy refused to rent us a scooter, siting the fact that she had never heard of Sam Pan Bok, and that she didn't know anyone in the region to help us if the scooter broke. I jokingly told her we would take the scooter back up the plateau, and she referred me to a guesthouse down the road for my scooter rental needs.

Brooke reflected in a cave / hole. This would be twenty feet underwater in the rainy season.

Unfortunately, the logistics took until the next morning to work out, nixing our planned six am departure. Nonetheless, at nine o'clock our two cylinder scooter puttered northerwards with Brooke and I riding double like Lloyd and Harry in Dumb and Dumber. Taking a 130km scooter ride sounded like a fun way to cover a lot of distance while resting our legs, but the reality of sitting in one butt numbing position for three and a half hours while trying to milk 65km/hr from our lawnmower sized engine, all while dodging dogs, cows, cars and the ever present mini tractor, while occasionally being buzzed by passing trucks made for a ride that was more type II fun. Still, arriving at the river to find only a random Lao fisherman in the midst of thousands of tiny lakes made the ride worth while - barely. 

Our trusty lawnmower steed

When it came into view at the end of the dirt track we had followed, the river was about as wide as a US interstate. It would have been tempting to illicitly swim across to Thailand, except the river poured through its canyon with enough velocity to make any swim life threatening. The contrast to every other stretch of the Mekong we had seen - typically more the temperament of the Mississippi in New Orleans - was the big surprise of the day.

The Grand Canyon of Thailand...

The return trip was as irritating as the outbound journey, and the delayed start combined with our slower than anticipated pace meant we didn't have time to cycle the 30km south to the ruins at Champasak as we had planned. As a bonus kick in the pants, the hotel we had spent the previous night at had filled up, but thankfully the one two doors down still had space. We printed our Cambodian evisas at a print shop run by a recent college grad Lao/American, who had moved back to Laos from upstate New York to be with her family, before dining on delicious pasta served by an exuberant Italian across the street.

Someone built a hut to relax in while looking at the river

Making up for the previous day's delay began at 6am, as we finally beat the sun up. Crossing the Mekong at sunrise dispelled any lingering sleepiness, and the cool temperatures with no direct sun added to the wonderful ride to Champasak. A European foursome of two Spainards and two Dutch passed us at an orange juice stand, so we rode the remainder of the 30km with them. Both were planning a European - southeast Asia ride over the course of a year, but in opposite directions. Not showing up to work in February crossed my mind more than once... 

Early morning in the rice fields along the river

While we would have loved to follow through with the plan of sleeping near the ruins to tour them at sunrise, we got there early enough to mostly beat the heat. The Champasak ruins are some of the most eastern Khymer archeological sites, of which the Angor Wat complex is the most famous. A thousand years ago, when the Khymer kingdom reached its peak, the major temples had been linked by a road system with rest houses every fifteen to twenty kilometers, allowing pilgrims to walk between the sites. 

An outlying building in Champasak

Steep stone stairs lead upward to the main temple, Wat Phu, passing between a gauntlet of gnarled plumeria - Fory might not be able to leave if he visited in a few months when the trees will blume. The smell at that time would be overwhelming and delicious. The combination of tree roots pushing the outer edge of the path upward, and centuries of footsteps wearing the middle down give a convexity to the path, mirrored by the overhanging plumeria branches. 

Plumeria!

Explorer.

An ornate caring above a doorway, I believe they are called lintels

Once the roughly three hundred foot ascent to Wat Phu is completed, the view of the rest of the complex opens up. Symmetric arrangements of smaller buildings line a road which splits at a several hundred yard long rectangular pond facing east. I found the stairway to be more impressive than the temple itself, although the worn gray stone buildings of the temple complex, tucked into the side of the mountain next to a year round spring also created a memorable atmosphere. If we had beaten the other tourists (we shared the area with maybe thirty other people) the temple grounds would likely have felt more mystical, watching sunrise over the distant Mekong. 

After wandering the grounds for about an hour, we descended back to river level. A museum with well preserved pieces of Khymer architectural features such as carved lions and ornamental doorframes shared the complex grounds, but we passed through quickly since the full force of the tropical sun would soon by bearing down on us. Despite the impending sun and heat, we had decided to press on as far as possible towards the Four Thousand Island area to makes up time we had last looking for the scooter in Pakse. The shortest way to do this would be to follow a dirt road along the west bank of the river. We hoped that would also be the fastest ...

View from inside the temple complex

The columns within the windows are typical of Khymer architecture

Since our puny hand pump had trouble inflating my tire to acceptable pressures, we stopped at a car shop and used their air compressor to top off our tires, checking the pressure by hand and feel. Satisfied that we wouldn't pinch flat, we continued south. Apparently, not many white people pass through this area, because kids and adults were even more enthusiastic in their greetings. For a country in which children sprint to wave at us, this level of enthusiasm might actually have endangered us, since we were constantly taking our hands off the handlebars to wave back, despite the uneven dirt surface. Blessedly, the excessive pleasantness of the local population was the most difficult part of the road, which shared almost none of the characteristics of the mountainous dirt roads that had hampered us in northern Laos.

Interlopers.

On one occasion, a larger tributary to the Mekong blocked our path. When we arrived at the bank of the river, a man with a motorized wooded raft set off from the opposite side, charged us a dollar each, and ferried us across the obstacle. Smaller streams typically had bridges over them, but most seemed like they would be washed away in the rainy season. Finally, after about one hundred kilometers of dirt riding, the road ended at a dock on the Mekong. Sunset had just begun, and it didn't look like anybody was around to man the ferry. Fortunately, I  convinced a man relaxing in a shack above the river to take us in a boat across the river - I think he was the ferry man but we were never quite certain.

No crossing this one.

I say he ferried us across the river, but really he only ferried us halfway across the river. We had reached the uppermost end of the Four Thousand Island region, or Si Pan Don in Lao. In contrast to the three thousand holes area, the Mekong splays out across several miles with literally thousands of islands interspersed between rivulets ranging from ten to a hundred meters wide. This far upstream, a single large island, Don Khong, splits the Mekong in half, but each fork seemed only slightly smaller than the Mississippi. To cross all the way to the other side would require another boat trip from the island's eastern side at the ferry terminal 10km south. Luckily, a few guesthouses clustered along the river near the terminal, since the spectacular sunset indicated we would not arrive before nightfall. With only a few cars on the whole island, riding at night felt quite safe, apart from the pothole ridden pavement that made us wish for dirt roads again.

One of several ferries

After 155km of riding, our longest day of the trip, we arrived in town and settled comfortably into dinner and a guesthouse. With the Cambodian border crossing the Mekong at the end of Si Pan Don, the rest of our trip through Laos would be accomplished mostly by boat. The gentle dirt riding, small riverside villages and friendly people were the perfect end to our riding in this country. We had spent a little over six weeks covering almost all of its north to south distance, something I don't think either of us would have predicted when we started our journey. Without intending to, we had passed through all but two of Laos' provinces, while missing the capitol Vientiane. I wish that I had made more progress learning Lao, but with the basic Lao we picked up, I think we were able to get a feel for the country, while still seeing that Laos would offer more the more we could communicate. 

Most of all, I'll miss the food. Prior to this trip, I was in a bit of a rut concerning breakfast, with sweet options predominating in the US, and savory options usually being bacon and eggs (which is delicious). Here, people ate any number of savory dishes that actually provided enough fuel for several hours of riding. Surprisingly, breakfast would be when the best sticky rice would be available, since kilograms of it were freshly steamed in bamboo baskets at markets and on the roadside. 

Our approximate route through Laos

It all made it into our plate at one point or another

These tiny oranges were the tastiest and most reliable snack

One of my mom's good friends when I was a child was a Thai man married to an American woman living in Texas because of his love of cowboys. We often ate at their house, and the various unremembered dishes eaten by hand with sticky rice while sitting on a ricemat floor became Thai food in my mind. However, despite having eaten at innumerable Thai restaurants in the US, none of them even approximated my memory of childhood Thai food. Most don't even have sticky rice.

Roadside noodle soup. A huge surprise, delicious, cheap, and better than pho in Vietnam!

One of the fancier dinners, with a salad on a bed of river kelp

Somehow our only picture of sticky rice, and it's outside of it's bamboo basket. Otherwise a very typical meal.

While biking through Laos, it became clear that what I remembered as Thai food is actually much more like Lao food. Regardless, for me, I don't think we could have had better food if the road was lined with Michelin stared restaurants. While our dinner of fish stew, vegetable stir fry and sticky rice was on par with our typical dinner, sitting above the Mekong with thousands of starts reflecting between the islands, it was pretty spectacular.