Sunday, December 30, 2007

...and a Happy New Year

Hello again

This will be our last post from Laos. Only 3 more days here and then we will be into Vietnam. We spent Christmas in Vientiane and splashed out on a French meal for dinner. No presents, no cake, no tree... (no family either of course!).

This is the monument in Vientiane, built at the end their version of the Champs-Elysees (A.K.A "the vertical runway" as it was supposedly built with concrete donated by the USA for a new airport).

After Vientiane we headed south down the main road - route 13. The way out of the capital was seriously dreary with hideous industrial areas, choking red dust, and a headwind. We were afraid this would continue for the next 400km but luckily things got much nicer. Although this is the main road there is minimal traffic. Plenty of cows, goats, pigs and children frolicking on the tarmac with buses racing full speed down the center line weaving in and out of whomever dares to cohabit their space. Below is a typical village school, of which we pass several a day. Often the kids are screaming at us, and playing krator (volleyball but soccer style, so no use of the arms and with a rattan woven ball) in the field which they share with some cows.


The towns along the way have been small but pretty nice. No English speakers for 3 days so we have been doing plenty of miming and pointing. Not much of an issue at the restaurants as they generally only serve one dish - a nasty noodle soup I think we have mentioned before for its lack of taste and nutritional value.

To get through this nice but somewhat boring section we have done some big days of riding, up to 155km. This is our longest day yet and was a bit of a miscalculation. Expecting to do only 50km we left late but never saw the particular village we were aiming for. Having seen a few places to stay over the first 50km we reasoned there would be more but not so! We arrived in the dark, which we have been trying to avoid due to stories of truck drivers on P and personal witnessing of liberal amounts of whisky with their dinner. However it was fine as half the scooters drive with no lights in the pitch black so the other traffic seemed to slow down in anticipation of this.

Now we are in Savanakhet, the last time we will see the Mekong on this trip. Its a funny town, seems half abandoned with many shops closed and not a great deal of people about. Some nice old buildings but most are pretty run down and the streets are often little more than a gravel pit with piles of rubble along the edges. We cannot figure out aspects of these countries, like the litter everywhere (is it that hard to put it in a bin?), and the rubble and junk piles. At the restaurant we went to for lunch, which was a nice one, there was just a jumble of stones, gravel, and a big pile of sand in the yard. Everything seems to be in a perpetual state of half-finishedness which cannot be taken as maintenance as it is clear that nothing gets any attention after being thrown together.

From here its east to Vietnam. Looking forward to seeing some derelict tanks and helicopters along the way as we are going into one of the main areas of combat in the American War.

We hope all of your dreams have come true for 2007 and that plenty of unachievable resolutions are made for 2008. We are biking to the moon.
D&C

Sunday, December 23, 2007

Merry Christmas!

We have finally arrived in Vientiane, the Capital City of Laos, in time for Christmas eating and drinking. Within 5 minutes of arriving here we had been offered opium by three separate tuk-tuk drivers, but I think we'll pass.



It was hard to leave Louang Prabang - the nicest city we've come across in the last two months. The city is incredibly green with coconut and banana palms, and we spent an enjoyable few days wandering through the cobbled back alleys and trying out different restaurants and bakeries. The buildings are a combo of left over French colonial architecture and more traditional Laos wooden houses. There is plenty of the derelict and in some spots a bit too much of the noveau touriste, but overall this is diluted by the fabulous buildings, monks etc and it really is a charming little town.

One of the highlights was splashing out on a "Adventurous Lao Gourmet" meal - a five course tasting menu which included grasshoppers (surprisingly good), bamboo worms (bland), crabs wrapped in banana leaves, riverweed, disgusting pickled fish, sweet sticky rice, and finishing off with "cat poo" dessert, so called because of its look rather than its taste.

We then spent 3 days biking over some spectacular roads - the best in SE Asia so far (and people thought we should get the bus! Pah!). Great hills and views, lots of small villages, and one night spent at the base of a hugely impressive peak. This toothy number came out of nowhere as we turned a corner in the road to see the 2000m mountain towering over the valleys around it. The next 30km were spent basking in the mountain's glory as we headed towards it, and a resort at the foot of it was too good to pass up. This place even had a natural hot pool out the front, although we didn't figure that out until it was time to leave.

However... It also apparently had some lax hygiene standards, which had a lax effect on me (D) - laxative that is. After a truly horrible ride the next day as the symptoms got worse and worse, leaving me a gibbering mess barely able to keep my head up, we arrived in Vang Viang and spent the next 5 days mostly holed up in our guesthouse (I would really describe this as festering in a pit of doom, to be suitably dramatic).

Today we managed to leave, after a couple of false starts, and decided to forgo the biking in the heat for a change of pace - kayaking. On hearing that kayaking was our 'break' from cycling, one of the other guys on the tour said "man, that's hardcore". This confirms for you all what we mentioned last time.


We kayaked down the Nam Lik River towards Vientiane, although most of the distance we covered today was actually in sangthaews - a truly terrifying mode of transport. They are the size of a ute with bench seats in the back, filled to the brim and then some with you and 25 of your closest friends. The drivers here don't instill a lot of confidence - they travel fast and they drive like they own the road. At one stage we were four abreast - we were passing a scooter, while being passed by a large bus, with a truck travelling in the opposite direction - and these aren't 4 lane roads. There was also a very near miss with a cow, and in one particularly memorable moment, a tour bus threw a bag of sick out the window which smacked into our windscreen. Bring on the cycling again.

The kayaking itself was great, we were the only people in our group not to fall out on the rapids (did we mention we're hardcore?). Now we are settling into Vientiane and sussing out the best places to eat for Christmas Day when we intend to do nothing else. There are plenty of French restaurants we'd like to try. Christmas is not celebrated here, although some places have made token efforts, and put up trees, singing santas etc.

Hope everyone has a great Christmas and gets everything they asked for Lots of love from Claud and Damien

Thursday, December 13, 2007

Sabaidee!


Well, here we are in 'Lay-oss' (this is how Kennedy pronounced it, apparently he thought American soldiers wouldn't want to go to war in a country called "Louse", even though its pronounced with a silent S by the Lao people - another great example of in depth foreign policy research from the worlds only 'super'power). We've just arrived in Luang Prabang, a very civilised town filled with bakeries and great restaurants. We've spent the last week hanging around in the backwaters of Laos (literally, we've spent a lot of time on boats).

The biking has been great - the scenery is good, but also the people are very welcoming. It's hard to convey the sheer excitement of the children as we bike through these tiny villages where they probably don't see too many tourists. Usually our visits are preceded by cries of "falang falang" (white person) then kids come tearing out of houses and run onto the road, calling out sabaidee, SABAIDEE, SABAIDEEEEEEE!!!!! waving and grinning like mad. It's very cute and entertaining.

We started off down the Mekong. The first town we hit was a pretty intense intro to Laos, with locals careening down the hill towards the boat so they could run on board, grab your bags then get a fee for the 'service' of carrying them up the hill. With the bikes to deal with, this left me (D) last but not least off the boat and surrounded by about 20 highly insistent beggars while Claud raced off to beat the other travelers to the best hotel rooms.
Glad to leave this town, we headed off north through a surprising amount of tiny and really basic villages. There are only 6.5 million Lao but the towns are not that big (something like 200,000 in the capital) so there seem to be people spread out over most of the countryside we pass. The villages are as simple and as poor as can be - bamboo shacks on stilts over dirt, no power, with the basics of finding food seeming to be the main pastime. The bigger villages, a couple of which we stayed in, have generators giving power from 6 - 10pm.
After leaving another real dump of a town (apparently a 'dirty weekend' spot for the Chinese, which the condom under our hotel bed would attest to) we carried on north to a river valley - the Nam Ou. This was far more spectacular than the Mekong, with vertical karst peaks towering over the river and a bit of native bush, most of which has been burnt off elsewhere in the country by the locals 'slash and burn' farming techniques. We stayed a couple of nights in a village only accessible by boat and spent a day fishing with 3 Lao guys in their boat. Very cruisy, particularly after a big lunch cooked over a fire washed down with a few shots of Lao Lao which is the local fire water.
A bit over travelling with our bikes, which are a hassle when not using them, we decided to forgo the last day of the boat trip and bike to Luang Prabang. This resulted in our longest day yet at 147km but it was a nice ride (despite the drivers - there may be only a few cars but each one is travelling at light speed on the wrong side of the road, seemingly highly surprised that someone else might be coming the other way). The Hmong villages along the way were celebrating their new year which apparently is a time for match-making games where highly costumed men and women line up opposite each other and throw balls to those they like.
This town is a massive contrast to what we have seen so far, going from the extremes of poverty to french cuisine and artisan silversmiths. Nice to go to a bakery for breakfast today rather than sitting down to another bowl of fue (pronounced fur), or noodle soup, with dodgy mystery meat.
Next its south to Vientiane ("The Capital City" as the road markers call it) over a foreboding set of mountains that a few have suggested should be tackled by bus - we say 'stick your bus, we're hardcore'.
Ciao from Laos
D&C

Monday, December 3, 2007

Good bye Thailand!

Hi

Well, we've been in Thailand for 5 weeks, and the time has come to move on. We are currently in Chiang Khong, the border town on the Thai side of the Mekong. It took us 6 days to bike here from Chiang Mai via lots of small, interesting towns.

The first stop was Chiang Dao, a village about 80km north of Chiang Mai where we stayed in a bungalow at the base of an impressive looking mountain. When we arrived we visited the Chiang Dao caves where a guide showed us "interesting" rock formations such as a chicken, an elephant's lung, a lotus flower etc. Some of these were a bit dubious, but the chicken was reasonably convincing.


That evening we had a meal cooked by a 17-year old Thai, and it was delicious. We started with banana flower salad with prawns, followed by pork stew and snapper fish (caught from the stream outside our bungalow) with ginger and apricots. Dessert was parfait with a Thai fruit called Lamut - a bit like a pear but caramelly.

Onto Tha Ton the next day - a small town where life revolves around the river. Very pretty town, but we didn't spend long here. Onwards to Mae Salong - a Chinese settlement perched in the hills (a sweaty, steep ride to get there). Full of character, steep streets, and lots of tea. It felt like we'd left Thailand - the restarants all served Chinese food, the shops had Chinese lanterns and Chinese characters over the doorways, and the slopes of the hills were covered in tea plantations.

Mae Sai was our next stop - a town on the Myanmar border and, incidentally, the northern most point in Thailand. It was packed with markets and Burmese and traffic, and all really quite hectic. Our guest house had a view of Myanmar just over the river, and we amused ourselves by waving at the Burmese. This town was also the end of highway one - 890km back to Bangkok.
From Mae Sai we biked to Chiang Saen via the Golden Triangle which was really not as exciting as you might think. Actually it sucked. You could hardly see the confluence of the rivers over the luxury hotels, hordes of tour buses, massive carparks full of junk stalls and the gaudy statues. But it was our first glimpse of the Mekong which was cool - the road from there to Chiang Khong has pretty much followed it. And we had a massage sitting in chairs overlooking the river which was great.
So thats Thailand done. 1861km in total, which took us 109 hours 38min to bike. We will miss Thailand, especially in light of our Laos guidebook which informs us that malaria is rife, there's no hot water, and electricity is from 6pm-10pm. Still, these books tend to look on the dark side of things so we will probably encounter lavish neon lighting displays and hot water cascading from every faucet. Time will tell.
Living in hope, Claudia & Damien