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This looks like a good day for driving yet another 100 km. Let’s see if Mike is going to be able to get himself together and if this freaky junction village has another joint to have some coffee ‘cause I could sure use some with all this food I’ve been not having lately. And then, maybe even find the right way to go on...

Hey, it only took us an hour to actually get started but at least I had some coffee and now I’m ready to go! And look at the other white people on bikes, which can only mean that we’re on the path to salvation, or, at least to the next stop. Oh, how I wish to get Mike to move faster and maybe stretch it a little bit and drive up to Tham Kong Lo today so that we’ll have less to drive tomorrow... Now that would be a nice thing: for once, I wouldn’t have to wake up this early and just take my time. Well, all in due time. For now, let’s drive!

Hmm, it appears that this rocky dirt road is not that bad and I can almost drive normally. Cool. Wait a minute! Did I put some sunscreen on? Although it doesn’t matter much because I’ll be orange anyway, although it will be from the dust and not the sun. This is what ‘safety first’ means, not that silly helmet that Mike always insists on tying tight around his head. And, if you think about it, driving with no shirt on, as he does – men and their tans! – is far more dangerous than driving with the helmet untied, as I do. Well, at least my skin won’t peel like that of a moulting gecko and like it once did. But I don’t want to remember that. It could make an interesting blog post but there definitely has to pass more time until I can actually think about that.

And look at that! So this is the ‘environmental disaster zone created by the recent flooding of the Nam Theun 2 dam’ that the prick of a guidebook was talking about. It really looks amazing. I guess I have enough time to stop and take some pictures until Mike gets here. And even if he does stop, I’ll catch up with him soon.

What the hell is wrong with the bike? Something’s definitely off but I don’t understand what. Could it be this gravely road we’re driving on? Damn! I should stop and check the bike because not being able to take curves is not my style. Oh, yeah, cool: another flat tire! How come everything’s going wrong for me these days?! Well, at least Mike is here, not that he can be of any help but at least I can shout at someone. Bad self-joke, I know... Anyway, let’s see how we can go about this: there’s nothing here, except this ‘environmental disaster zone created by the recent flooding of the Nam Theun 2 dam’ so trying to fix the tire here is totally out of the question. Which only leaves me with driving like this ‘till we get to some village or someone that can help. Let’s see now... oops, too fast. This piece of Chinese metal doesn’t want to do what I say any more. Slower... Okay, it looks like I’m getting the hang of it and I can think about some people who could actually appreciate my skills. Even I’m impressed by this. And I actually imagined something like this a lot, only getting the flat tire while driving really fast and on some blacktop back in Romania. Well, this will have to do. But why in the name of unnamed higher forces did this have to happen here: there are so many ups and downs and hairpin bends and I could have had so much more fun with a bike that’s properly equipped and with enough atmospheres in its tires...

This looks like it could be one of those villages made for people displaced by the flooding that the guidebook was describing. Well, this is my chance. How was that again? Yang hua, right? Flat tire. But I’m sure I’m not the first... and they actually have a proper workshop! Oh, how could I have imagined it would be that easy?! Of course they’re out for lunch. And of course we’ll have to wait, who knows how long... At least he’s a fast one. And nice enough to line the tire with another piece of rubber so that the tube will be protected from further mishaps. Yeah, man, I know, you don’t have to explain... I know the tire is bad but hopefully you did your job well and I’ll stop having bad luck from now on.

Well, look at that! We’ll have to ‘datour’ from the dirt road onto some dirt road... now this is a change. But the scenery is something I’d love seeing every day; granted, not with the bike’s seat imprinted on my butt and I really have to stop thinking about it for a while, maybe the pain will go away. How did I do this driving-a-motorcycle for so long without ever thinking about the pain of countless of hours of sitting down? Maybe bigger bikes have bigger seats or something. Let’s get back to what’s important: which Disney soundtrack was I singing now? Oh, if only Mona were here, she could recite all the lyrics I forgot... oh, well. Caaaaan you feel the love toniiiight...

So, if all the surroundings look like this, than that’s how I probably look like. Hmm, a small price to pay! And it seems that the dirt road is finally over and we’re not that late right now. It’s bound to be smooth sailing from now on!

Wow, now this is what I call driving! This road totally rocks! And the curves and the ups and downs... this is really exciting! I love it. And with this new skill I’ve discovered, everything’s more fun. Let’s see: this thing, I mean the motorcycle, has no clutch so if you press and hold the pedal, it actually doubles as a clutch or a neutral point and this means I can cut the engine and I can drive downhill without using gas. I only have to remember not to raise my foot from the pedal. And this thing flies 60 downhill! Should I wait for Mike or go these next 20 km on my own? This one’s a no-brainer: onwards!

This is what I call ingenuity: giving a new meaning to useless things, like, in this case, bombs. And these Lao people, who turned the bombs into boats... now that’s really something. Kind of sad, though but totally remarkable!

Aaaand here you have your sunset of the day! But it’s so cool to see it from this nice view point, meaning that all that driving uphill finally paid for something! And the whole valley looks cool, especially with this light. This is just about 10 km from the village. And, supposedly, the next 50 kilometres to Tham Kong Lo are really good. If only Mike would be willing to drive them today. I just have to wait for the perfect time to skilfully place the question (as if that’s going to do it) but at least I have to try... Okay, back in the saddle...

It appears that my knees almost stopped shaking so this is a good time to recap: I did have a whole side of a hill to overhaul that crawling bus and driving uphill behind him not only gave me another good reason for cancer from exhaust fumes but took forever. And then, on the down side, I bit the bullet and gave a try at passing him. True, the fact that I was experimenting with my no-engine method was not such a big help because it put me right in front of that SUV that was grumbling uphill exactly at the time that I got to the middle of the bus. Yes, the bus did hit the brakes, as did the SUV, but I had no power to arrow past the bus and with these brakes, there’s no way I could have slowed enough to get back behind the bus. So this is how I ended up on the grass on the other side of the road. And the grass was green, thank heavens! Well, at least all drivers smiled at me when I tried to gesture an apology (ha! The perks of being non-Lao). Note to self in CAPS LOCK: OVERTAKING REEKING BUSSES CANNOT BE DONE WITHOUT A WORKING ENGINE. Although I’m still pretty proud to use the Lao way.

Wow, the diversity: I’m really overwhelmed by the choices of food around here! What should I choose? Fried noodles with vegetables or fried rice with vegetables? Or I could go for the fried noodles... But there’s also that fried rice... With these many choices, we should have went on and driven the last 50 km but Mike was too exhausted. At least the room is nice and I didn’t hear any rats around the place as I had in other places (yeah, those ones playing or hunting or whatever above the room could have been awarded with the Most Original Place to Spot Rats award). And how can they imagine we’ll pay almost double for that room with a hot shower? News flash: this country doesn’t really need hot water save for a couple of months a year and, although right now you couldn’t say it’s actually hot in the mornings and evenings but this is totally bearable.

Well, all in all, this was a pretty good day. Except for the flat tire; and the aching butt; and the soul shaking overhaul of the crappy bus; and this sticky dirt that under no circumstances wants to get out from under my fingernails!

The Loop - Day Two part II

Save for the battered behind, the frozen fingers, the numb legs and the general dusty orange tint from the dirt not settled on the dirt road, driving a motorbike in the Lao countryside is a joy. Provided you don’t end up driving into the sunset when, as if on a special outer-sensorial queue, all the creatures of the night come to life. Especially the insects; tiny beings that don’t live to see another day swarm all over the place, especially towards something; especially towards the light; especially towards your light.

I was driving peacefully, going about 25 km/h trying to avoid crashing because of the trenches left by tractors in the moist ground, when I started thinking about finding ways to avoid the attack of the insects directed at me. Well, like I said before, the creatures were flying toward the light but I suspect most of them had a really bad aim, so they ended up bombarding my face instead. You see, I was so concentrated on getting somewhere, preferably intact, that I didn’t really register the sunset and its aftermath. The previous day I didn’t have as many problems with insects but this being truly the countryside, the number of insects increased dramatically. Also, I should have seen ‘the environmental disaster zone created by the recent flooding of the Nam Theun 2 dam’ on one side of the road, as my guidebook confidently instructed, but that also leaves a gap in my memory. There shouldn’t have been a long way to the next village and the obligatory guesthouse so I pushed on, deciding to leave Mike to tackle his own insects (although, at the impressive speed of 5 km/h, not even insects could have hit him too hard). And, as I reached the village and for the squashed bugs stuck in my eyes, night was peacefully wrapping around the freakishly quiet village.

Along came Mike 15 minutes later commanding to find the first guesthouse and stop fooling around with this driving-through-the-night-on-a-crappy-road stuff and just relax. The only problem was that we couldn’t find a guesthouse and not even an open shop, not to mention somebody who would understand what we wanted and who could have assisted us. Thus I had to use my language skills yet again and I trespassed some properties in search for someone. Kids and women, I decided, would be of no help because neither are any good at giving directions so I spotted some elderly men chatting around a fire who weren’t very impressed by us, mostly because they had difficulty seeing us through the get black unlit night. But, as soon as I put on my help face, they promptly started explaining something in the tones on ‘faaaar away’. Wait! What?! To my great joy and happiness, the village we were looking for was being pointed in the direction where we came from with the indication of something along the lines of ‘30-40 km’. Apparently, we took the wrong road at the aforementioned junction and so, ended up further inside the unseen Lao countryside. Off the beaten track, to put it mildly, eh?!

Mike bluntly refused to turn back but he soon realized that there was no other solution other than asking some chicken to move over and make room for us in their chicken coop. So I offered to drive just in front of him so that he could see where he should be driving. I’ll spare you the excruciating details of driving 5 km/h under an amazing sky full of stars (of which Mike didn’t see any because he was too concentrated on cementing his eyeballs on my rear tire) and doing everything humanely possible so as not to get bored to tears by the voyage, from standing up on the bike, singing every imaginable Disney movie soundtrack and smoking while trying to drive without hands (at one point I even decided I could light up while driving but gave up on that particular project). Two hours later we were back in the junction village and were checking in at a very respectable hotel where it sounded like they were having a marriage party (of course, the karaoke people propped the bar, as always) so we set out in search of some food; on foot, of course because neither of us wanted to get their lower parts back on any bike seats sooner than necessary. And there was some food indeed: the only open place we found was serving only barbecued meat and didn’t even have any rice for that matter.

‘This is how one becomes an alcoholic’ I reasoned while ordering another beer and watching Mike sharing a nice barbecue dinner with the local dogs. With our bellies full (some of us with food, while others with nausea-causing beverages), we went back to the hotel where we planned to crash the party plundering everything until I would find something to quench the thirst of my recently swallowed beers. Simple: I would go out and smoke a cigarette and incidentally stroll towards the area where people were singing before and now just cheerfully chatting away and, surely they will not be able to restrain their curiosity and would invite me over. And sure enough, it was exactly what happened. So I sailed right in the scene where the only English speaking person out of a group of about a dozen Lao, was a nice young Lao lady, who asked me the usual while handing me – surprise! – a beer. They sat me down on the mats and in a matter of seconds I became the focus point of the entire gathering.

‘And your darling not coming?’ This took me by surprise.

‘Who? Oh, Mike... well, yes, he’s coming only he’s taking a shower right now.’ To which everybody laughed as if I’d made the joke of the day. So they made me go and get Mike and then proceeded in keeping us well hydrated with beer after beer, cheerfully shutting out any possibility of me desperately needing some food. However, by this time, I was in no mood for food any more.

‘Oh, this is not marriage?’ I asked obviously confused by the reason of their happy gathering on a Tuesday.

‘No. It only because we had football match with other city.’

‘Very nice!’ I said thinking of a lot of people that I am sure would have been really impressed by this.

‘... but we lost,’ the nice girl told me equally happy. ‘So now we drink because our team so bad that not possible to beat the other team never.’ She then translated this and my joke of the day was short-lived and this new über-joke took the cake.

You might wonder how I escaped this joyous celebration without having to be dragged back to bed by someone slightly less inebriated than me. But I outfoxed them and, with the excuse of going to the bathroom, I left Mike in the loving hands of one very, very happy group of Lao people and sneaked in the room without a second thought.

Thus, day two ended with me barely hitting the bed and already cruising on the dreamland motorcycle.

The Loop - Day Two part I

Well, although it’s very much out of the current situation of affairs, I’m still keen on evoking the wonderful experiences I’ve had on Lao soil. The last account containing something about said soil was all about the hypothetical situation of the unfortunate traveller who set out with too much hope and enthusiasm and too little possibilities of pouring her frustrations on whatever was around.

Spoiler alert! That hypothetical situation totally took place.

Spoiler alert #2! I jest you not: that poor unfortunate traveller was none other than I.

The next morning we set out on what would appear to be a very early hour so that, at least in my head, we would compensate the missed start of the previous day. But packing everything and tying it to the bikes and trying to find at least some coffee proved to be too complicated to be finished early enough, so it was already around 9.30 AM by the time we revisited the (previously unnoticed) roads of the night before. We even discovered where we were in relation to where we wanted to be – not there yet – and where we wanted to get by the time the day would be over – pretty far.

Still, because of my wrongfully estimated guidebook (and we shall get to that in due time!), I suggested we should try visiting a pretty interesting cave, Tham LotSe Bang Fai, really out of the way and not easily accessible for tourists but, as someone from the city told us, it would only be 80-something kilometres from Tha Kaek. According to my estimations, this would mean a fairly simple detour of about 40 km from where we were, which would mean that we could be back on track in time to not get caught driving by nightfall. Alas, my calculations didn’t include the fact that Asian distances are longer than they appear, meaning nobody actually means what they say about distances. So, the 40 kilometres morphed into about 60... up to the junction towards the cave with traditional, authentic dirt roads and the inevitable trenches that adorned them. And, hail Buddha!, they had a sign: Tham Lot Se Bang Fai 50 km. Check mate!

I was pretty set on seeing the cave so I started driving on the road but:

• It was a pretty damned dirt road, even the first part of it, not to mention the part with the little stream-crossing and the pushing the bike through the water, to which I had already been let in on by the motorcycle rent guy.
• It was already about 1 PM, and it would take us at least two hours to reach the cave and about the same to get back, not to mention the visiting and the getting to the next guesthouse part.
• My companion was not the best of drivers, meaning that he professed his love for driving bikes and not his driving skills, the latter being composed mostly by short drives on Southeast Asian islands without a driving license. Also, to be on the safe side, he preferred the constant driving speed of 40 km/h. Constantly.

It was then that we sat beside the dirt road, me with my crushed hopes, him carrying his newly acquired plastic bag of petrol (he refuelled and the standard quantity of gas didn’t all fit in the tank, so they gave it to him nonetheless: to go.). And, against all of my wishes, we settled for the reasonable thing to do and turned back.

I did get my wish of seeing the inside of a cave, as Laos has tons of them wherever you turn, so, at one point, when I stopped by the road to give Mike a chance to catch up with me (only because I refuse to drive 40 km/h when a respectable 60 is still slow) I saw a cave entrance and decided that I should not miss my chance again. By the time Mike came, I was nervously jumping from one foot to the other and crazily pointing towards the cave. He indulged me and we went for a closer look. My standards of travelling always imply at least a headlamp by my side, which I used like a pro when I ventured inside the cave. Only my lamp isn’t anywhere near the standards of contemporary headlamps but would probably impress some turn of the century miners, although rather because of the pretty blue light and not because of its intensity. Basically, I saw more of the inside of the cave with the help of my camera’s flash than with my cute accessory headlamp. And what I did see was enough to call it a day with my underground activities:

What you can see there are normal underground creatures that don’t really squeal or even move but when you see them, you’ll likely want to start screaming yourself. As you can see, these are not friendly-looking creatures. But what isn’t all that visible is the sheer size of them: so, whenever you encounter anything looking like a mutant bloodshot-eyed moth or an overgrown deformed spider with way too many legs, each the size of your right hand, you can confidently put an end to exploring places best left to researchers or Indiana Jones.

I retreated shamefully and, back on The Loop, we drove through overpopulated villages, mostly avoiding school kids on their way home (which is basically what they do, at any given hour), and, as you might imagine, got to the point when we had to watch the beautiful sun set. Yes, that’s right: the sunset, as in: soon enough you’ll start driving by ear or, as faith would have it, by hands and feet in order to feel your surroundings as it’s increasingly hard to see them. And, at a junction, we had to make the decision: right or left? Of course, the guidebook was of no help whatsoever, as it convincingly told us to drive straight ahead, an impossible option if one insisted on going around buildings...

You'd think day two would be over that fast? Not a chance! But the rest of it, tomorrow...

Happy Dreaded Birthday!

Well, I'll admit, it is a little late (two days too late, to be exact) but this cannot not be committed to the collective memory of the world wide internet.

It has been an entire year of peaceful - sometimes frustrating - communion to which I have been subject to and it seems to go on stronger than ever. I'm happy, at peace and content in this relationship and I do not intend to part with it. Yes, it's true, our first get together was uncomfortable and the entanglement of our relationship took well over 12 hours, and then it took about a month for adjusting, but in the end, we're happy together. I would even go so far as to say that I'm closer to being complete, whole!

Sure, all relationships have worse times and rocky parts and I won't hide the fact that I have had second thoughts about this union but now, one year later, I realize it has indeed been worth it.

So, this one goes to you: I'm truly blessed to have found (and accepted) you in the first place. You've accompanied me through all seasons, dry, snowy or rainy and never once complained. You've brought me joy and made me feel special. Even the problems you posed made me find hidden meanings in everyday life and, at the end, the solutions gave me satisfaction. You were always there with me, close to me, putting your special touch in everything I did, changing the way I see life and am seen by other lives. The world changed because of you and, though it sounds conceited and vain, I changed the world through you. Our special bond did raise flabbergasted questions and doubts but it also candidly touched the realm of serenity and delight.

I'm sorry but I am now drained of all the churning words that have been inside of me for the last couple of days and desperately wanted a chance to display their affectionate appreciation. And all I can say now is:

Happy Birthday, dreadlocks!