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Published: October 28th 2009
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A beautiful day in Luang Prabang
also note the gorgeous but disintegrating french colonial architecture It was June 30th and the bar had been closed for eleven days. I went to collect my pay for the prior two-week period and knew something was wrong when my boss suggested we sit down on the patio and talk. Although I must avoid the specifics, the result was that I couldn’t work in the bar anymore. The visa my boss had gotten me wasn’t quite right, and the authorities would soon come by he bar to check that it was. I was devastated. It’s not that working in a bar was my dream job; it was just that working in the bar had sort of given me a place in the community, above being just another long-term tourist, I had more of a purpose and reason for being there and felt more rooted. My job loss left me feeling adrift and confused.
My boyfriend had not fallen in love with Luang Prabang as I had and he was eager to go explore other countries. He encouraged me to go on an adventure with him, maybe by motorbike. I still really loved Luang Prabang, and felt like I’d just returned from traveling. But without a need to stay, I
wanted to acquiesce to his desire to see more. I understood that need; I’d had my chance to see many places, he hadn’t, so why not give him his chance too?
After two weeks of tumultuous soul searching, we left Luang Prabang for what was to be a month of bicycling through Thailand. I think I will always wonder if that was the right decision; for what followed was a glorious adventure, but I sacrificed an incredibly fulfilling and happy life where I was. We left most of our belongings at a friend’s house, planning to return in a short time. And we’d scrapped motorbikes because we thought it’d be too boring and non-physical, just sitting all day, atop a piece of leather. We took the crazy bus ride south, ten hours on cliff-side roads, with constant, winding, switch-backs, to the capital, Vientiane. We had hoped to find and buy bicycles there, and thus begin our journey from Laos. But after a few days of fruitless searching, finding nothing but the ubiquitous poor-quality “L.A. Riders”, we realized we’d have to start our trip from Bangkok, Thailand.
We took the smooth overnight train from Nong Khai, Thailand, just at the border with Laos, to Bangkok, arriving bright and early at 7 AM. We had researched the location of a supposedly incredible, completely modern bike shop, and so walked directly from the train station to ProBike. The walk took us about an hour, and we arrived at 9, just after the shop had opened. We plopped our bags down in a corner of the shop, and spent the next six hours choosing bicycles and gear.
ProBike is as current as any bike shop in the US, and their employees speak perfect English. There were hundreds of bikes in the store, but our choice was easily narrowed down to last year’s models, priced at $600 less than the cheapest of this year’s models. That left us with two bikes to choose from each. We test drove them around the block; J chose one model, I chose the other. Then we picked out kickstands, water bottles, water bottle holders, a tire pump, an odometer, spare tires, tire patches, a pair of padded bike shorts each, back-racks, two rear panniers each (bags that attach to the back-rack, hanging from each side of your bike to carry your stuff), and one additional front pannier to carry my camera safely. We did take a break from this madness for lunch, at which point I said to J, “Is this crazy? Shouldn’t we think about this for a day before we go buying hundreds of dollars of bike gear on a whim?” J convinced me that buying hundreds of dollars of bike gear on a whim wasn't crazy, it was actually a great idea, and so we went back to the shop, and had the technician install everything on to our new bicycles. Our total bills came to about 20,000 baht each, or $600 USD, which was perfect, as we’d each just received a $600 USD tax rebate from President Bush. What a timely blessing!
So all of a sudden, it was late afternoon, and instead of a backpack and a shoulder bag, as I’d had when I walked in to the store, I now had a brand-new, shiny bicycle, fully loaded.
Bangkok is not my favorite place, it’s noisy, crowded and smelly. But J hadn’t spent any time there yet, just a few hours in the airport, so the plan was to stay for a few days before starting to bike. I thought he’d enjoy staying and playing in the Khao San Rd area, a very touristy, but fun part of town based around the wild Khao San Rd. Faced with the very real option of biking across Bangkok, a city known for it’s crazy traffic, on a bike I’d never ridden, with heavy bags I’d never ridden with, I proposed that we leave our bikes at the store, and come back and get them when we departed in a few days. J would have no part of that idea; we’d just bought these bikes! We had to ride them! Try them out! Keep them close!
Oh god, I was so scared!!
But the seven miles across town turned out to be fun! On a bicycle, you can weave through the constantly stopped traffic. Cars, used to all sorts of strange, small vehicles on the road, even give you the space to ride. You can travel so much faster than by foot, and see the city so much clearer than by tuk-tuk or taxi. Once we arrived at Khao San Rd., we quickly created a strategy for hotel-finding that would stay with us throughout our journey. One person would remain with the bicycles and the gear while the other person would search out a hotel, one that was cheap and nice but would allow us to bring our bikes in to the room. We had already decided that we would never let our bikes out of our sight; if we did, and they were stolen, we’d consider it our own fault. I mean, we’d be biking through some very poor areas, we wouldn’t even expect people to pass up a good opportunity, like a really nice bike.
J loved the craziness of Bangkok, we had a ball exploring, and right on Khao San Rd. we just happened to run in to Matt and Kandy, a wild and wonderful American couple I’d met in Southern Laos. The two equally crazy free-spirits met a year earlier in southern Thailand, and fell madly in love. They were married within a few months. Honestly, these two make me look shy and afraid to try new things. They took us out with them to the scandalous PatPong area of town, an area I’d checked out before, but J had never seen. No inexperienced bar-fly himself, by the end of the night, these two had made J look like a Catholic priest.
It was time to go, and the next day we began what would be a 1500 mile bike trip.
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