Tour de Laab

Leaving phong nga, we attempted to wait out the rain while our coffee slow-dripped, but instead it only thickened. With one last look at the karst mountains looming into the clouds, we put our heads down and rode east. The terrain mellowed, and the rain lessened as we moved east. The eastern ho chi minh highway, while not as spectacular as the west, was a pleasant and easy pastoral ride. Cars still honked every time they saw us, but there were so few cars it almost didn't matter. Several hours in, it felt less easy. We rode fast to stay warm in the rain, and I stayed well outside of Jove's draft to avoid his rooster tail of Vietnamese road grime. Buffalos add to the road grime 70 miles in, we turned south onto Vietnam's famed highway 1. It runs the entire north-south length of the country, serving as a combination of superhighway and local main street when it passes through towns. Traffic was fast, but riding on 1 was not as bad as we had been led to believe....

Eastward!   The first day of Brookes twelfth palandromic year dawned with Vietnam calling from the east. After saying goodbye to sticky rice and the lady who had fed us the last two nights, we rolled slowly out of town, searching unsuccessfully for the Soviet surface to air missle marked on our map. A gentle wind cut across our shoulder from the north as the karst towers of the last several days consolidated into limestone cliffs, and dry rice fields turned to dry rice fields pockmarked with forty five year old craters. Here, the Ho Chi Minh trail had spilled over the border into Laos, drawing with it chains of half ton bombs dropped from B-52s in an unsuccessful effort to cut this mercurial path. For most of the day, little changed apart from the density of craters and an occasional yellow starred flag to suggest Vietnam lay over the horizon. Shortly after lunch, this would all change. Bomb crater in the foreground Turning left, the wind quickly gained intensity forcin...

With three days until our vietnam visas activated, we turned north from our Christmas eve overnight in That Phanom, rode straight back to Nakhon Phanom and beyond it to the Thai Lao Friendship Bridge #3. Riding from the border crossing, the usual Lao road conditions were immediately evident - namely, unpredictable changes in road surface and outgoing children. We rode straight though the evening school commute, so the greetings from children were multitudinous. We ended the day in Thakek, 50km by road but 500 meters across the Mekong from where we started two days prior. Thakek is a gritty post colonial riverbank town, recently populated as the starting point for a popular motorbike tourist loop, so we were in a concentration of other falangs for the first time in a week. We sat on the waterfront and had a nice multicultural Christmas dinner of pizza, sticky rice, and steamed vegetables with jeow. The next morning, a cool drizzle kept us finding excuses to delay our start. A typh...

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...