Notorious for being Southeast Asia’s sleepiest country, little landlocked Laos has been quite an adventure so far for me.  I’m jumping ahead in the narrative a bit (I know, I know, a cardinal sin!) but I’m hoping to give everyone a little taste for cycling in SE Asia.  I’ve spent a bit over a week in this country: a few days on the river ferry to Luang Prabang and another day after my arrival enjoying the increasingly upmarket colonial town, then a quick (ha, ha) cycle south to the spring-breakesque Vang Vieng.  Add on more time in this land of Simpsons reruns, banana pancakes, and internet cafes than I like to admit, and you get more than 1/4 my total allotted visa in Laos… but first, let me tell you about the cycling trip.  Warning: If you’re my mom, you may want to skip this entry!

Geoff commented in an earlier entry that the road between Vang Vieng and Luang Prabang is beautiful… but probably not something he’d want to cycle.  Oh, if only I’d seen that before I’d left!  I pretty much got my butt kicked the first day.  After three weeks of cycling fairly flat Thailand, I assumed I could continue at approximately the same speed through the mountains.  Clearly, an amateur mistake.  I set off with a map suggesting the closest largish town was only 71km away…  and got to the first kilometer marker and found it was actually more like 120 km away!  Ouch.  I rapidly scaled down my plans for the day, and decided to just enjoy the mountains, villages, and biking.

It was nice to be back on the road after a few days just crossing borders and sitting on boats.   I zipped through the first few kilometers of mostly flat ground.  Every so often, I’d pass a small town of just a few wooden shacks.  The children would rush out and wave, smile, yell “Hello” or “Sabadee” and try and give me a hi-five, and giggle at pretty much everything I did.  You feel like Miss America, waving every few seconds - it’s very exciting.  At one house just filled to bursting with little girls dressed in the embroidered Lao skirts, I stopped for water, and was given as much (filtered - I watched what they poured from!) as I could drink, and then they refilled all my bottles for me while we talked at each other in English and Lao.  Still, I had quite a ways to go before I reached my goal destination, and after a few minutes of communication attempts, capped off with great success in Lao counting, I set off on the road again.  The little girls chased me out the door and even raced my bike across the town.

Eventually, the flat ground steepened and I realized that it wasn’t “up and down” anymore.  Instead, I was pretty solidly in the “want to die” stage of going up a mountain, and the climb showed no signs of ending.  Apparently, all “real cyclists” just love the mountains, because you get the best views blah blah blah.  I’m not a real cyclist so I just wanted the road to curve downwards again.  Each time the road snaked ahead out of view around a bend, I was sure the climb was ending, as I couldn’t even see anything taller in the distance.  Then, I would head around the corner myself and see that, in fact, ahead of me was an EVEN TALLER mountain and the road was heading straight for the top of it.  Lots of fun!

Still, the road was absolutely beautiful, and the little villages and laughing kids made the climb not so painful as it could have bee.  At one point, some little boys even gave me a push on my bike up the hill (yes, I was going that slowly.)  Still, after a few hours of climbing and an unfortunately unknowable number of kilometers as I wasn’t paying attention, I reached the peak and got to coast down in glory for around twenty minutes.

This particular downhill, while steep and curvy and lots of fun, was over far too soon.  Houses lined the river in the mountain valley, and as I pedaled through I got a different vibe from the other villages where kids yelled out friendly greetings, waved, and smiled at me.  Here, everyone just stared, even if I said “Sabadee” or waved,  and the feeling for me was one of discomfort.  While it was getting late, I decided to push ahead to the next village and see if it was any friendlier.

An hour and a half later, with the sun starting to set and myself only halfway there, I realized my mistake and decided to turn around.  Better to stay in an unfriendly village one night than spend hours biking through the unlit mountains, by myself, in the dark.  I turned around and in just a few minutes sped down those kilometers back to the river village, where I grabbed a guesthouse and prepared to stay the night.

And… let’s just say my intuition was right.  The village was unfriendly and worst of all, unlike in ANY other areas of Thailand and Laos I’ve been to so far, the men of the village certainly held some stereotypes about Western women that I haven’t seen since the Middle East.  Simply put, they assumed that as I was traveling by myself of course I needed “company” for the evening, and even my female guesthouse owner thought I would need a second set of bedding for when a second person joined me for sleeping!! Staying by myself in a hut surrounded by noisy roosters, unable to lock the door, I set my bike against the door as an impromptu alarm and slept little that night.  Anyway, nothing happened, so don’t worry Mom!  In fact, the next morning, when the guesthouse owner realized I had spent the night alone, her attitude was much friendlier and more welcoming. I’m not sure exactly what happened with that particular village, but from everything people say it seems an anomoly rather than the norm in Laos.

I set out determined to finish the climb that I had started unsuccessfully the previous day.  Rather than complain, again, about climbing up mountains I’ll just say that twenty kilometers later when I reached the peak, I was more than ready to pack it in for the night, even though it was still the day and I had planned to go much further.  Instead, I found myself a tiny little room for the night and sat shivering under the cover for the next several hours, fighting off fever, chills, headache, and “digestive” problems… that’s right.  Biking up a mountain gave me malaria.  Ok, not actually malaria - really Mom, I don’t have it! - but it still got me pretty sick with a lot of the same symptoms.  I decided to take a bus the rest of the way to Vang Vieng where I could actually have a room with a bathroom in it, and if symptoms got worse I could see a doctor.  Fortunately, while I spent the next 36 hours or so really getting to know that bathroom, I did get better and was able to spend some time doing activities in the town.

Anyway, believe it or not, in spite of everything I’ve actually been having a great time biking.  Being out, seeing all the little things you miss on the bus, feeling like you’re getting around with your power, and just being able to think for a bunch of hours a day is really nice, and it’s gotten me excited about travel in a way I haven’t been since I started this trip.  I’m not entirely sure I’ll ever be able to simply “backpack” a trip normally again.  Tomorrow, I continue on to Vientianne, and am looking forward to some FLATTER terrain… also nice because it’s easier to skip a town you get a bad “feel” from.

***

Coming soon, an article on the globalization of candy!