Wow Laos

We have seriously been smack dab in the middle of nowhere for days on end. Squat toilets, no electricity, navigating landslides with care and river crossings with our sneakers slung over our shoulders. Most telling though is that none of the children we’ve been passing know the word hello. Some are naked, all are dirty and heartbreakingly sweet, serenading us with sing-song “Saba -dii’s” from beneath thatched huts or lined up alongside dirt roads. They have nothing to play with but old tires and huge beetles which they fearlessly crash together like matchbox cars. Children as small as six spend all day with their year old siblings strapped to their back and little ones not yet potty trained go without pants.

After being in Vietnam for 5 weeks we became accustomed to being treated with disdain, outrageously overcharged and occasionally ignored upon entering eating establishments. We needed a major attitude adjustment and the immediate, bashful kindness the Lao people showed us helped sustain us while we traversed the most difficult biking terrain yet. I’m not lying when I say tears were shed (Danielle) and screams were bellowed into the jungle (me) and on two separate occasions each of us was ready to quit as we suffered and triumphed through the unpaved, rocky landslide ridden roads of northern Laos.

Now here we are in our first Laos city relaxing in a mysteriously enormous upscale hotel for 90,000 kip ($10)/night where I‘m pretty sure we’re the only guests aside from a pair of Chinese male cyclists (cyclists are everywhere apparently) who look like they ran off course from the Tour de France and ended up in Laos with their alien head helmets and high tech multi colored cycling gear. If they had been around yesterday when we rolled up in our crumpled up dusty shorts and t shirts on our silly bicycles with the huge padded seats they would have surely snubbed us. Certain western concepts seem to not have translated very well in this hotel, we were given only spoons to eat our fried eggs at breakfast and had to eat our cereal with chopsticks the following day, there is wireless internet but no one knows the password, there’s a toilet paper roll holder in the bathroom but no toilet paper and we had to pay our full bill upon check in.
The countryside we’ve been traveling through since we reached Sapa, in northern Vietnam has been unreal. The mountains are bigger than anything we imagined and we’ve both developed strategies for dealing with them. I breath and exhale in threes while I chant, “ I-I-I-ca-a-an” and stare at my knees moving up and down until I’m borderline semi-coconscious and my brain and body are separate entities incapable of tormenting each other and Danielle plays alphabet word games with herself, games like, name an item found in the pharmacy from A-Z or her favorite, name a swear word from A-Z . Periodically I’m rudely awakened from my meditative state by a yell from behind, “What’s a food that begins with U?”

The day we left Sapa we climbed the highest peak in Vietnam and were rewarded with a 26 kilometer descent. It was tremendous. The mountains here are populated with a mixture of ethnic Vietnamese and various hill tribes, Black Hmong, Red Dzao, people who still wear layers of brightly colored embroidered garments, piles of silver and bronze jewelry and various mind boggling, complicated head gear. They live in small villages scattered throughout the mountains in thatched, stilted huts. We are as bizarre and exotic to them as they are to us. The people near Sapa are used to tourists and were entirely disinterested in us, but as we biked farther west toward Laos we created a serious, wide-eyed stir wherever we went. For the most part the villagers were skeptical of us, maybe even suspicious.
Back in Sapa, we met a woman named Ping who brought us to her village (a 2 ½ hour walk) and cooked us a meal in her little hut over a fire on the floor while we held her youngest baby who did not smell like Johnson & Johnson‘s baby powder and cried every time she looked at me. Ping told us that when she was 10, before the tourists came to Sapa, she remembers the first white people she ever saw. She said she was playing outside when three of them come walking into her village and she ran inside to hide and told her mother the big people were coming. She said all the women in the village told the children to come inside and they hid the babies because they thought the white people were coming to take them. It is with this information that we roll into every remote village all smiles and nods hoping to not incite terror in the inhabitants.

In addition to feeding us, Ping also acted as my nurse. I took a spastic fall on the way to Ping’s village and bloodied both my knees. While Danielle laughed hysterically at my stupidity (I went down like one of those handheld, collapsible toys that stand erect until you push the bottom with your thumb), Ping squeezed my elbow and said, “In my house I give you special medicine for your accident.” After lunch, against Danielle’s fervent protests, I let Ping apply a pungent smelling concoction to my knees which she claimed healed her husband of a broken arm in two weeks (I’m not gangrene yet).

A day before we were scheduled to reach the border we came around a corner and found the road entirely impassable. Rock slides and mud slides are fairly common but we’d always been able to get through up until that point. We rolled passed the parked vans thinking we could just push our bikes through and then we heard falling rock and actually absorbed the situation. There were three men suspended from the top of the rock face knocking the remaining loose rock free with sledge hammers and below them was a pile of rubble covering the entire road the length of about 4 buses and at least 15 or 20 feet high. We’re talking enormous boulders the size of Hyundais piled on top of each other and a cliff straight down to the river below. We stood there stunned, watching the giant rocks come crashing down in a powdery blitz unsure what to do.

It was 60 mountainous kilometers in both directions to the nearest town with a guest house and it was well after noon. For the next 4 hours as vehicles and motorcycles accumulated on either side of the mess we sat around and waited as a pay loader cleared a small path through the rubble. We couldn’t bare to backtrack 60 hard kilometers and the idea of riding on a winding, landslide prone road after dark was not appealing so we strapped our bikes to the roof of a bus heading toward the border and at 4:30 the debris was cleared and we embarked on the most terrifying bus ride of our lives.

Other than my irrational fear of dogs, not many things truly terrify me. However, I was brought to uncontrollable, hysterical tears three times during this bus ride. In general third world, high altitude bus rides are always hair raising, but this was a kind of reckless insanity I can not fully explain. Our bus driver was a crazed sociopath who spent most of the ride viciously beating the dust off the dashboard and passenger seat with a dirty rag, accelerating with great force as we approached all sharp, blind curves overlooking steep cliffs, and screaming things maniacally to the woman whose job it was to collect money.

During my third crying fit Danielle braced herself and stood up. Using hand gestures she demanded that the driver slow down which actually worked a little bit. I was still convinced the bikes were going to come loose and fly off the roof. At the first stop I climbed out the bus window and got up onto the roof to inspect them. Before I got back in the driver took off and I could hear Danielle inside the bus screaming, “Stop! Stop my friend is up there!!” He did and I climbed back in.

It is truly miraculous that death was avoided and our bikes never flew off the roof. We arrived after dark in Dien Bien Phu, the town 35 kilometers from the border, loaded our bikes up and headed off to find a place to sleep. We ended up in a nasty, formally fancy hotel where there were cigarette holes in the sheets and the towels smelled like perm solution. That night two restaurants refused to serve us and I almost cried again because I was so hungry and tired and frustrated. We found a place on the street that served us some fried rice which we ate while two large dogs licked the ground by our feet and scratched their fleas incessantly. It was the first time since we left that I’d had enough. I wanted to be home in a clean restaurant without food refuse and dirty napkins all over the floor and mold growing along the walls and fluorescent lights dangling from the ceiling and dogs and bugs brushing against me and people sitting around staring at me with disgust while I ate. The truth is though, if I really couldn’t take it anymore I’d have the luxury of getting on a plane tomorrow. Not a day goes by here when we aren’t exceedingly thankful that we were born into the ease of life in the U.S.

Usually at the end of every day we experience what we call our “last slap in the face.” Sometimes it’s a busted up petrol truck pouring diesel in our faces for 15 slow kilometers, or a nasty bit of unpaved road, or my personal favorite, the day a grown man threw a rock at me as I rode by (I like to imagine that he‘s still cowering in his flip flops, praying Danielle doesn‘t come back for him). Our ride to the border at Tay Trang was Vietnam’s last slap in the face to us. The last 20 kilometers were straight up without a break and damn it was hot that morning. We powered through like race hounds lured by rumors of friendly people and good food in Laos. When we finally reached the top not a soul was in sight. The border officials were enjoying lunch and made us wait 40 minutes until they were sated. After they had their fill they came out to inspect and prod our bikes. One official insisted on taking Danielle’s bike for a spin. Following the antics we were set free into that odd nowhere land between borders. The road immediately became unpaved and three kilometers later we entered Laos at the very summit of the mountain, with the outline of mountains visible in all shades of blue and purple in almost a 360 degree view around us.
So far Laos has been incredible. We both wish we could scoop up all the children and take them back home with us. There’s so much need here, it’s overwhelming.

We’re making our way to Luang Prabang and will likely have buns of steel by the time we get there.