In theory, today’s ride should have been a nice six-ish hours from Phonsavan to Muang Hiam. Take route 7 out of town, switch to route 1C, don’t miss the turning where route 1C goes left, turn right, done.

You can probably spot where things went awry. In some respects, it’s testament to how “good” route 1C is in comparison to every other road in Laos, that I was making such good progress. “I can’t have come as far as the turn yet, it’s only been three hours.”

Of course I missed the turn and didn’t notice. My only observation was that the road conditions became somewhat worse, but I put that down to the increased number of lorries dragging themselves up and down the mountains.

Only when I stopped for petrol did I check navigation and wonder why my ETA was two hours later than at the outset. Yes. A 25km wrong direction slog meant another 25km in reverse.

An aside

You may be thinking “well duh, this is what satnav is for.” Of course I’m using a navigation app (damn you GMaps). But my phone isn’t mounted to the bike, it would be vibrated to hell and probably down the side of a cliff in minutes.

So I have only GMaps mirroring navigation to the Apple Watch app which is (shocker) absolutely shite. It takes five minutes to detect that the phone is navigating. It then requires two taps to show directions (sure, I love to stop just to tap my wrist). The navigation display is useless for two-wheel use, with tiny text for “distance to next turn” and “ETA”. And the use of the wrist tap to indicate which direction to turn is lost in the general vibration of riding a motorbike.

So yeah. I missed the turn, and when I realised I got angry, and riding a motorbike when angry is not A Good Combination. Either I had to stop riding, or stop being angry with myself, and only one of those was a real option.

Back I went. The turn was so fucking obvious, but also obviously too soon. The remainder of the ride was acceptable to challenging but nothing too bad, in Lao terms.

Hot springs

One of the reasons I got annoyed was that I’d hoped to be in this one-horse town early enough that I could go for a long soak in the hot springs just up the road. As it was, I arrived 2h30 later than planned and assumed the springs would be closing at dusk.

Good news: they close at 8pm, so my weary ass and shoulders got some relaxation time.

As I’d pulled into where I intended to stay I’d noticed three other bikes similar to mine. This is a popular stopping-off point on this loop so no great surprise, and also no great surprise that their riders were already in one of the pools, since the springs are only two minutes away.

I got talking, two Aussies (brothers as it turns out) and their riding guide. Ended up having Lao hotpot with them all in a local place before coming back to settle in.

Lesson learned

Again: be fucking kind to yourself, you idiot. You messed up. It happens. Everything turned out okay.

And while I didn’t stop many times, there were, of course, some spectacular views.

Tomorrow

The route to Nong Khiaw has one turn. I shall be sure to make it. And it shouldn’t be a long journey, if the Aussies are to be believed, as they came from there today.