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Published: February 5th 2007
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Village People
At this village, when we stopped and got off our bikes, we were just greeted with strange and suspicious looks from the local kids. Did we really look as if we'd just dropped out of a tree? Day 249, 4th February
Ban Dong - Sepon - Muang Phin - Sethamuaki
This trip is turning into a lesson in madness! Either we’re going to get ourselves blown up with un-exploded stuff from the wartime - or, we’ll get shot by rebels! We’ve already lost Toby and Stephane. Toby went to get his bike repaired in Vietnam and we’ve not seen him since. And Stephane passed us yesterday while the rest of us were necking down beers - he’s somewhere up ahead. So, read on and shake your heads in dis-belief at our stupidness….
We actually had a good sleep last night and after studying our maps closely found that we were actually camped on the Ho-Chi-Minh Trail! We’d staggered into the undergrowth last night to pitch our tents, however, this morning we crept down to the road on tip-toes considering the huge amount of UXO (un-exploded ordnance) lying about from the war - Laos was the most heavily bombed country in the world, apparently.
We found the quiet orange-dust road and set off on a misty morning, which brightened up quickly to become a hotter and hotter day as time wore on. We’d left the
From the border...
This is the road as you leave the border and head west. maritime weather behind and were now on the dry and dusty plateau. We began to discuss the Lonely Planet Cycling guide to Vietnam and how useless it had been. It was everyone’s agreement that the dudes who wrote it did the trip on a motorbike or in a car because it bore fuck-all resemblance to what we were really doing on ground-zero! As the pages were nice and thin, though, we decided to keep the book as a supply of emergency bog-paper! (Sorry LP - your backpacker books are great but bikepacker stuff is crap)!
After five miles of slow cycling and heated debate, we heard a yell from the bush to the right of us - “Hey Guys”! It was Stephane. We found a hole in the thickly orange-dust-covered bushes and crept through - the sight that beheld us was classic: The entire landscape had suffered a fire recently and consisted of bare ground and blackened tree-roots. This showed off the pock-marked landscape that had suffered a thousand bombs, and was only apparent now after the fire. Stephane was camped in a bomb-crater, with an orange face, repairing the 6 punctures he’d got the 10 miles from the
BEER LAO
The only choice in the Lao PDR. border to here. Funny thing was he didn’t realise he was in a bomb-crater until we pointed it out!
He still had a lot of repairs to do so we agreed to split into three groups and soldier on; I went with Rory, Nick and Scott would go ahead and order beers where they found them, and Stephane would go on slowly, hoping to bump into Toby. If we didn’t meet again on the road we’d catch up in Savannakhet.
The road became redder and dustier with more and more potholes. The jungle came up to the sides of the road, the little traffic there was spewed up billows of dust and each time this happened we huddled into the edge of the road until we had visibility to cycle on again. In the many straw built stilted housed villages, children came running to the side of the road. There were shouts of “Sabaddie” from the kids and even from the jungle, this means “Hello”! The Lao people are noticibly darker-skinned and rounder-faced than the Vietnamese and Chinese, and in a way seem more naïve and curious than any other people we’ve met so far.
We carried
"Danger UXO"
Four stupid guys with puzzeled expressions - I'm sorry to say that I'm one of them! on west along the dusty road which in sections was paved, and in many places we noticed a new road being built. In many sections we managed to ride along the steam-rollered surface that had just been finished. At Muang Phin, we met up with Nick and Scott who were looking over the burnt-out fusilage of an old US helicopter. The heat had gotten to Scott again and he wasn’t feeling well. So we spent an hour at a nearby café drinking Beer Lao until we decided to cycle off into the setting sun to find a camping spot. All along the roadside were signs warning “DANGER U.X.O”. We couldn’t just camp on the roadside, so we looked for evidence of footpaths into the bush and found one. We all pitched in a line hoping it was no buffalo-track and that we’d be stampeded to death during the night. Stephane was camping elsewhere as he’d never caught up with us. We listened in the night for a distant explosion, there was none - he’d camped safely!
Total Miles: 11276.62 Todays Miles: 57.37 Average speed: 9.3 Time on bike: 6:09
Day 250, 5th February
Sethamuaki - Atsaphangthong
Road Renewal
Half way to Savannakhet the road was in a state of repair and some sections were like this - a nightmare! - Uthomphon
No explosions last night when we went to piss, just a star-filled sky. We cooked breakfast by the tent to save cash and then carried on westwards along sometimes good roads and sometimes appaling surfaces. Nick described Laos as ‘India without the people’ having been there. It is a truly magical place what we’ve seen so far. The villages amaze me, the happiness on the childrens faces, and their cries out from the straw huts in the villages.
However, we stopped in one village for water that was really pox-ridden. The peoples faces were covered in scabs and spots, and the kids were holding dead mice which were bleeding at the mouth, as some kind of macabre toy! We didn’t take any water and made a sharp exit…
Just after midday, the temperatures became so high that Scott and Nick had to seek the shade in one on the old abandoned stilt-houses at the side of the road. It was siesta time and we talked of what we expected in Savannakhet. We’ve been saying for the last 8 months now that SE Asia will be our playtime where we’ll take it easy, split up and
UXO
There are piles of this stuff from the wartime in every village. I think the farmers bring it in as scrap metal? do our own thing. Apparently, Nick wants to continue into northern Laos alone on his bike. He’s been with us since Beijing and now it’s time to leave. Rory and Toby want to high-tail it to Bangkok, that’s if we meet up with Tobes? Scott wants to go diving off the west coast of Thailand alone. So it looks as if Stephane and I will be a team as we want to see rural Thailand away from the cities. But I still have a yearning to do some lone cycling, maybe through the jungles of Malaysia. The general consensus is that we’ll split up and meet in southern Malaysia near the end of March so that we can do the last leg into Singapore together as a team.
The last 20 miles of road today was perfect, newly tarred and freshly painted white lines down the middle. We sped on with an excellent tailwind, the sun setting before us once again. We’d noticed that between the jungle there were areas of dry paddy-field. So we headed off the road southwards into the patchwork of paddies, and about half a mile from the road camped in a secluded spot.
US Helicopter
The fusilage of this shot down US copter lies un-ceremoniuosly in the centre of a village. We started cooking and it went dark quickly. As we were eating and chatting with our Tikka headlamps on, we became aware of the noise of other people tramping towards us…no, around us. As we adjusted our eyes to the darkness we saw that we were surrounded by a brigade of rag-tag soldiers with machine-guns at the ready. Ooopps! At times like this there is only one course of action - be humble and smile. Rory, the smoker, took out his cigarettes and started to offer them to the soldiers, this helped. He gave the man who looked in charge the rest of the pack. We gave then a little food, exchanged a few English words - “Manchester United, Queen Elizabeth, George Bush (followed by an imitation of puking which they liked), Prince Charles” and so on. After around 30 minutes, they shook our hands, and left us in peace. They never returned, but in the middle of the night I’m sure that I heard distant machine-gun fire…
Total Miles: 11335.25 Todays Miles: 58.63 Average speed: 11.5 Time on bike: 5:04
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Tot: 0.422s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 20; qc: 106; dbt: 0.1127s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.4mb
ilovemangosteen
Thao Tran
craziness
i've been dying to cycle through se asia. you guys keep it safe!