Success II: The Succession (🤔)

My journey back from Nong Khiaw to Luang Prabang was without incident or mistake. Anyone would think I’m getting the hang of follow this road, turn left, follow that road, stop which is great for the last day of biking.

Route 1C west of Nong Khiaw is probably the best quality I’ve experienced in Laos, outside of the main towns and cities. The asphalt-to-pothole ratio is remarkably high. A shame that it only runs for 28km before that turn left onto route 13.

Route 13 is (apparently) then most important road in Laos. It runs almost the entire length of the country north to south. Wherever there are built-up areas, there is road decay. Wherever trucks turn or corner, there is road decay. It’s great when it’s good, awful when it’s bad.

By the way: I have a whole section of my RAM currently dedicated to just how bad Google Maps is. I’ll save it for now because this is a nice post.

I’d love to tell you that I got some nice pictures on the way, but I didn’t. I took two, in a 30-second pitstop because once you’ve passed three trucks in convoy, you don’t want to have them catch up again.

Honestly I was so over it and going probably a little too fast in places, but in any case, I made it to LP in just over three hours, in time to get a fresh cut and shave from Mr 50,000kip barber, and deliver the bike back to Harry. We had a nice chat, him again offering praise and some astonishment at my choice of route. But he’s right: it would be rubbish to have nothing to say about a journey.

Sunsets

On a slight whim, I power-walked down to the river bank to catch the sunset. It’s always slightly surprising how fast the sun sets, and I thought I might miss it. I found a wall to sit on, far from the shoreline but then I spotted some steps leading down to the edge of the river.

And there I crouched as the sun descended from behind some clouds, dipping then behind the treeline on the opposite bank. It was all extremely lovely, and I think a beautiful end to my (let’s not forget) spontaneous leap into Laos.

Who’dathunkit? I can actually navigate from place A to place B without getting lost, needing a boat or taking a 50km wrong turn.

On time into Nong Khiaw, a small town on the banks of the Nam Ou, and a magnet for backpackers, scooter-routers and loop-doers.

There’s a reason everyone wants to stop here and it’s this:

The terrain here is beautiful but uncompromising. The road from Muang Kiam is one of the worst of those I’ve been on. Back up into the mountains, and there have been frequent rockfalls and landslides. When they happen, the debris is simply pushed over the side of the cliff, and what’s left behind is pulverised by lorries into all-penetrating dust. Stretches of continuous asphalt are few and far between across the mountain passes.

Again, as I was riding I was struggling to comprehend the lives and lifestyles of the villagers who live right up against the road, every day as trucks, minibuses and pickups rumble past. The efforts that they make spraying water to keep the dust down seem Sisyphean. I can complain all I like about it as a once-through-and-done tourist. Living it every day seems like hell.

So I take these views as I see them: staggering natural beauty coupled with grinding poverty. An uncomfortable mix.

Terrible segue

What’s not uncomfortable is my accommodation for the next two nights (my ass will thank me). A little way out of the town is a new “resort” (doing a lot of heavy lifting) comprising about 15 wooden bungalows looking out over the river.

Whoever designed and built them definitely considered the wow factor.

There’s a hot shower, a heated toilet seat, and a view to soothe the weariest rider.

I shall make the most of it.

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.

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.

In the words of my friend and former colleague Andrew, mistakes were made.

Or perhaps, like Bob whatshisname, a happy little accident.

I’m writing this post while sat near the front of one of those narrow boats that transports everything here, from people to scooters to chickens to idiot white people with their oversized trail bikes.

And so you may be asking, “Matt, didn’t you rent a bike so that you could ride a bike?” It’s true, I did, but I did not bank on Google Maps being a filthy liar. “Oh yeah,” it said, “there are two routes from Vang Vieng to Phonsavan. Either go back the way you came a bit and then over the top, or take the southern road and approach from the south.”

I left nice and early, 8-ish, to give me plenty of time. After two hours, that southern route runs out of routeness. There was a bunch of construction workers where the road disintegrated into absolutely nothing and one gestured to me “no, go back and take the boat”.

The boat?

Ohhh.

The boat.

You see, while I was talking with the guy who sold me two new inner tubes to replace the ones that got nicked yesterday, I asked him which route was “better roads”. He gestured at the southern route and then pointed to a picture of a boat on a poster of tourist activities.

I smiled, thinking sure, but I’m not interested in a tourist boat.

“One a day,” he said. “At twelve. Take one hour from here.”

Meh. Whatever, thanks for the tip but I’ll be on my way.

It all became (sort of) clear by 10:30am.

The Boat

Eventually I find the boat on my third attempt. And I ask a tween what time it leaves, where it goes, how long, how much. Communication isn’t so easy when there’s barely a data connection for translation. But a calculator helps for numbers, so: 12 (time), 280 (price), the rest of it, a mystery.

More and more people are arriving on scooters and from time to time a guy wheels them down from the houseboat/dock that the boat is moored to. They neatly line up, transverse fashion and people can sit either side.

I’m getting a little concerned that there won’t be room for my relatively large bike (just be glad it’s not a GS1200…) but reassure myself with the general impression that I get from the Lao that “we’ll make it happen” and indeed he does, with the support of about five other guys to manhandle my bike into position.

“Great,” I think, “time to get going”, as I clamber aboard and take what appears to be the VIP seat near the front.

But nope. Still more scooters to cram on, they managed to get another four in the remaining space by my knees.

As of 2:20pm, that’s where I am, somewhere in the middle of a reservoir that I can just about see is fed by a river, that may or may not pass somewhere near Phonsavan, that the boat may or may not traverse.

What’s that about comfort zones again?

Postscript

Yeah the boat didn’t get anywhere near as close to where I needed to be, and since it’ll be dark well before I could make it to Phonsavan and the hotel I had booked, I found a very down-to-earth guesthouse.

There are a lot of roosters here. It may be an interesting night.

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.