Almost too tired to write this, so I’ll keep it brief. Today was hard, physically and mentally challenging to keep a bike upright and focus on the “road” ahead.

The route from Anouvong starts off badly, with the trucks from the open-cast mines in the area tearing up the road north out of the village.

The Ugly

But I became accustomed to it, able to negotiate the dips and lurches, the scrabbling tyres over rocks. In places, there are hints of what the road surface once was, and I began to look forward to them.

There is no other option, for me or the trucks, or the people who live here. This is their daily life, spending hours at a time going tens of kilometres. My trip was 115km, and Google-Who-Must-Not-Be-Trusted says it takes about 4h30m. In fact it was more like 7h.

I spent two hours negotiating my way across 15km of sand, rubble, gashes in the landscape. The only thing that stopped me giving up was that I couldn’t. Nobody is around to come to the rescue. Gotta keep keeping on.

I’m not an off-road biker, but this terrain is basically off-road, and I owe a lot to the bike for getting me through it. It handles these conditions well, even when I could not. Thanks, little Honda CRF250L.

The Beautiful

Still, the country of Laos still served up a delightful variety of vistas. Today was actually sunny from the offset, and that helps to lift the gloom of the dust (the dust, oh my word the dust. Some of the poorest people living by the roadside are drenched in it repeatedly as trucks, 4x4s and, to be fair, bikes, rattle past their doors).

Despite my needing to heavily focus on the road surface, and despite the ravages being inflicted by strip-mining, there are epic, wondrous moments when the brush drops away and I’m almost at the apex of the mountain and…

I took a lot of photos at this point. But I also stopped to just drink it in. Who else has been here? This took effort to get to.

It also took effort to get away from, but again I don’t have pictures of the worst of it. So here’s some others from the day.

Is it worth it?

None of this would have happened if I’d taken the obvious route from Vang Vieng to Phonsavan. It would still have been hard; the roads here are not pretty for anyone. But I certainly made an interesting choice.

Harry, who I rented the bike from, messaged me:

I did see you in the tracker heading towards Phonesavan from Vang Vieng via Long Chen.

That’s a hell of a route 😂

But you’re a brave dude for taking that route. I’ve not been there for a year but last time I went it was pretty clenching so to speak!

It’s been an experience. One I’ll remember.

Not one that I wish to repeat though.