It finally happened. I found a motorbike, a real motorbike. Turns out the first place that I tried, who were all booked up, split in two a while back so the other half of it had a bike for me. Big thanks to Harry for going through everything with me and setting me up with all the supporting equipment.
The Route
There’s a reasonably well-known loop to the east of Luang Prabang. I’m going anticlockwise so will stop at the following places:
- Vang Vieng (where I am right now)
- Phonsavan
- Muang Hiam
- Nong Khiaw
If you’re really interested, here’s a Google route.
Now if you were to believe Google Maps, it’ll tell you that the first stretch can be done in about five or six hours.
That would assume good weather, and perfect roads. The weather was pretty nice, overcast and chilly in the mountains. The roads vary from passable (reasonable tarmac but with random large potholes) to abysmal (ruts, rubble, stones, holes but with random flashes of tarmac).
There’s no money to fix any of this, and 40-tonne trucks lumber their way up and over the mountain pass every day, grinding away what’s left of the surface. For me on a trail bike, it’s challenging. For a scooter rider, unimaginable (but they manage, somehow).
And so it took probably more than seven hours (I didn’t really track it) and every part of me aches 😅
The mountain pass.
Of course you can tell you’re ascending. The landscape changes, the air cools. I had to stop to put on another layer.
The cloud cover grew closer and closer, until I was in the cloud. Did you know? Clouds are cold, and wet, and not especially seethrough. At one point I was down to about 10km/h, peering ahead to see where I was going, while negotiating with the road surface, lorries and nature in general, to stay the course.
But the views. The views.
All that concentration on the road conditions makes it hard to take in all the epic landscape. But when the chance arrives to pause and drink it in, it is (sorry) jaw-dropping. Pictures won’t do it justice but anyway:
One of the aspects I love of this kind of travel is the reactions from little kids as you ride through tiny villages. They range from wide-eyed amazement, to waving, to (for the second time now) flipping the bird, to an in-motion high-five as I passed two kids riding in the back of a farm wagon.
I don’t know how much more of these road conditions there are to come. I suspect a lot, so I’m glad that tomorrow I will have a rest day, and play tourist again.
