Gotta say I wasn't sorry to be leaving Vang Vieng, the place didn't really float my boat at all. Coulda, shoulda, woulda......but...it just didn't. However, my joy at leaving was short lived. It was raining. Oh shit! Paul picked a bad day to crawl back onto the bike. There was a thunderstorm in the morning, which Kay reckons is very unusual in the tropics, and that's what I thought too. Bloody great bolts of lightning all morning, quite unnerving all on their own, let alone what was happening to the roads. In the dry, the roads were pretty bad in many places, but manageable. In the wet, they would be a different proposition altogether, as we had surmised earlier. For a start, most of the bitumen was already polished or had bled to a slick, shiny surface finish which would be treacherously slippery in the wet. The numerous potholes all filled with water, so you could no longer tell which were the deep ones. I bottomed the front suspension several times in the first few kilometers. Then the traffic pumped muddy water out of the potholes, bringing with it a red mud which coated everything else. The mounds of red dirt protruding where some potholes had been previously over-filled were fairly benign in the dry, but were like ice in the wet. I saw Kay hit one with his front wheel and slither off sideways, then Alison hit one and it kicked the back of her bike out to the side. Some sections of unsealed pavement were made entirely of this red gloop, and it was very difficult to keep the bikes from slithering all over the place. I recalled a similar situation in Brazil, where one of our group went down hard and he and the bike slid into a drainage ditch, and I had to supress a rising panic more than once. It rained all morning, and I have to say it was a stern test, for me anyway. Did I get any photos? No, that was the least of my worries. Where is a film crew when you need one?
When the rain finally stopped, we had a reasonably good run for quite a while, which gave us a chance to get dry. Alison had a Go Pro running on this section, so we may yet get some footage, but by no means the worst of it. After a stop for lunch, we headed into Vientiane, the Laotian capital. Here it did not appear to have rained at all, but the last 30 km was through continuous roadworks and clouds of dust, corrugations and/or loose sandy stuff. Quite a day!
On the way into the city, we passed the National Convention Centre, which was a massive new building, guarded by a truckload of black clad soldiers or police (I couldn't tell which) armed with the ever popular AK47's. In the centre of town, there is a huge Asian version of the Arc de Triomphe. Kay always gets the group to park their bikes in front of it for a photo op, even though it means riding on the footpath and down a few steps to get to the right spot. This is frowned upon, apparently, so we had to be quick, and just in case, he had a Lao flag and an old Soviet style one to proudly display in the photo. Lots of the other tourists took photos of us taking photos of ourselves, but no cops turned up, and we made our escape. When we regrouped in the official car park, I noticed a hive of activity. There were dozens of scooters parked with digital printers attached to their luggage racks, powered by their batteries. Some entrepreneurial communists were making a quick buck taking snaps for the tourists and printing out high quality enlargements on the spot. I guess that's not frowned upon, or maybe the cops get a percentage?
We won't be here long, we leave tomorrow and head back into Thailand, hopefully for better roads and a better diet. So Vientiane remains somewhat of a mystery, as does Laos itself. In the short time it has taken to walk down the street for dinner, I have seen a few glitzy shops, and quite a few flash cars, including a nice pale blue Ferrari. Communism is working for whoever owns a Ferrari, but most people seem to have a pretty crappy existence. Generally speaking, Vientiane gives the impression of being unremarkable, possibly even a bit of a dump. As for Laos itself, Thailand's poor cousin, perhaps?
When the rain finally stopped, we had a reasonably good run for quite a while, which gave us a chance to get dry. Alison had a Go Pro running on this section, so we may yet get some footage, but by no means the worst of it. After a stop for lunch, we headed into Vientiane, the Laotian capital. Here it did not appear to have rained at all, but the last 30 km was through continuous roadworks and clouds of dust, corrugations and/or loose sandy stuff. Quite a day!
On the way into the city, we passed the National Convention Centre, which was a massive new building, guarded by a truckload of black clad soldiers or police (I couldn't tell which) armed with the ever popular AK47's. In the centre of town, there is a huge Asian version of the Arc de Triomphe. Kay always gets the group to park their bikes in front of it for a photo op, even though it means riding on the footpath and down a few steps to get to the right spot. This is frowned upon, apparently, so we had to be quick, and just in case, he had a Lao flag and an old Soviet style one to proudly display in the photo. Lots of the other tourists took photos of us taking photos of ourselves, but no cops turned up, and we made our escape. When we regrouped in the official car park, I noticed a hive of activity. There were dozens of scooters parked with digital printers attached to their luggage racks, powered by their batteries. Some entrepreneurial communists were making a quick buck taking snaps for the tourists and printing out high quality enlargements on the spot. I guess that's not frowned upon, or maybe the cops get a percentage?
We won't be here long, we leave tomorrow and head back into Thailand, hopefully for better roads and a better diet. So Vientiane remains somewhat of a mystery, as does Laos itself. In the short time it has taken to walk down the street for dinner, I have seen a few glitzy shops, and quite a few flash cars, including a nice pale blue Ferrari. Communism is working for whoever owns a Ferrari, but most people seem to have a pretty crappy existence. Generally speaking, Vientiane gives the impression of being unremarkable, possibly even a bit of a dump. As for Laos itself, Thailand's poor cousin, perhaps?
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