The Travels of That Man, Matt

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.

I’m tired today so I’ll keep it short (I hear your thanks from here).

Motorbiking

Went to check out a place to rent a (proper) motorbike. They were all booked out 😭 but the walk gave me the “opportunity” to cross this bridge, that only pedestrians and two-wheel traffic is allowed on.

There’s a similar, if temporary, bridge near my place in Berlin which feels rather less likely to drop me in the river below. But I made it there and back.

Good news (potentially) is that I found another place to rent from, and will firm up plans with them tomorrow. Bad news is that they are also located on the other side of the same bridge.

Fashionable Appropriation

A trip to the Traditional Arts and Ethnology Centre shone light on the many different ethnic groups that make up this region of Laos. Focusing on their heritage, craft and dress, a clear aspect was the theft of their identity by western fashion labels “borrowing” design elements without consent.

Even worse, when such theft was challenged and publicised, these luxury fashion houses threatened retaliatory action against some of the most marginalised groups in a poor country.

The lack of cultural intellectual property rights across the world means that this kind of thing will continue to happen without any compensation to those whose heritage is being traded.

In and around all that, Wats and a cat:

PS: still ❤️ LP.

(Well, kinda)

Hello from the Lao People’s Democratic Republic or as we say in the UK: Laos 🇱🇦

More specifically, hello from Luang Prabang aka Louangphabang aka ຫລວງພະບາງ in north central Laos.

Getting here from Vietnam was easy if not particularly direct. I flew at 9:30 from Đã Nẵng to Bangkok Don Mueang, sat in transfer purgatory for about three hours, then 90 minutes to the teeny Laos airport LPQ. It’s one of those where the plane has to turn around at the end of the runway to taxi back to the terminal.

Definite brownie points for me in getting an e-visa: no standing in the 200-person line for visa on arrival, only standing in line for immigration (which VoA people also have to do). $10USD more? IDGAF, worth every cent.

First impressions

First impressions were actually from the air. Coming in to land, we flew over the green-brown mountains that define the landscape here. Already I was captivated, it gave me a certain feeling of the Peak District as you see it approaching Manchester by air.

A key difference: zero infrastructure. There are people and villages down there, but there are no asphalt roads, no electricity pylons, no LEDs.

But that’s just the outer reaches. Luang Prabang has all mod-cons including electricity, lighting and its own beer. But no traffic lights, not really needed.

There’s also way more ATMs than GMaps would have you believe, which is good because if you read the reviews, each and every ATM will eat your card and debit your account and not deliver any money and pull the whiskers off a kitten and drown a donkey and … I obtained 2,000,000 kip (about 90€) without incident.

Otherwise: I had some good food. I walked through a pleasant night market (shocker, there was actually some nice stuff there), spent no more than 5% of my time walking in the road because the (wide, evenly laid) pavements were not always blocked by scooters and am now settled on the veranda of my very wooden hotel wondering why I didn’t come here earlier.

Photo dump