The String of Pearls

December 27, 2014

Wonderful Mekong towns in Thailand

Ban Pak Huai to Chiang Khan 33

Chiang Khan to Pak Chom 27

Pak Chom to Sangkhom 39

Dear little friends,

Let's face it. We are officially on vacation.

Don't get me wrong, we are riding our bikes longer and faster and every leg of the journey right now, and we're having a ball doing it too. But the roads are smoother, less violently hilly, with little traffic and great views and when we stop there is water and food and coffee and what one could rightfully call civilization, by our standards anyway.

Eric and Amaya have been on the road for EIGHT years! http://www.worldbiking.info/wordpress/

We are now on a stretch along the Mekong, a well-pedaled trail where sweet towns and cheap, charming guesthouses run like a string of pearls, at easy intervals, with amazing food and lovely, friendly people. We look up places to stay recommended by Frankie Roettgen and Brian Shaw and others who have come before us, and their recommendations are stellar and we may never leave the Bouy Guesthouse in Sangkhom.

The road from Pak Huai to Chiang Khan could be called schizophrenic, it was harder than we thought it would be, sometimes brand new asphalt with an eight foot shoulder and a lot of times rough gravel chewed up into dust by frequent passings of large double-trailer trucks hauling, hauling what? Water sprayed from them in a refreshing if disquieting mist, they smelled like petrichor, the "wet dust" smell of a summer rain shower. We discovered in good time that most of these trucks were hauling wet sand dredged from the bottom of the Mekong. No wonder they were struggling up the hills even more noisily than we were, if you've ever carried a bucket of wet sand you'll know.

There were other trucks, too, hauling gravel, dirt or huge rocks. More on that later.

We arrived in Chiang Khan finally, and cruised the wrong way onto its "walking street", it is a tourist town but there are very few foreign tourists here, this is for Thais, and all the signs are in Thai, although the cryptic tee-shirts for sale are usually in English. Thai tourists are a lot like American tourists, the national sports of eating and shopping are the same, so in the evenings the street is set up with shops and street food. It's a fairly tranquil and friendly scene.

Thailand wins the prize for most gigantic and gaudy buses. They are absolutely enormous.

The main attraction for Thais is the street of old wooden houses, it would be similar to one of the frontier ghost towns in the West, where it's quaint and nostalgic. I mean the sanitized recreated Old West towns, of course, because I suspect the originals were short on charm and long on smells and dust. Chiang Khan's wooden houses are now varnished and divided into guesthouses that are a bit overpriced considering they have shared bathrooms and paper-thin walls, but it was kind of fun for a couple of days. And just a soi away were the neighborhoods pre-charm, with weathered gray wood houses and motorcycles parked in the living room, keepin' it real.

On Christmas Eve we left Chiang Khan for Pak Chom, and what a day! The road was flat, and wound its way along the Mekong with beautiful views, the sun poured down but wasn't hot, it was the perfect day of cycling, a great gift to we who have at times doubted whether this travel mode was for us at all. By the end of the day we were glowing with satisfaction at finally feeling fit and happy cycling from town to town in Thailand. We had a cute little bungalow on the Mekong and some very good food and all was well.

Early morning mist outside of Chiang Khan.

The precarious platform in front of our Pak Chom bungalow.

This bungalow was surprisingly well-equipped, with A/C, a fridge, and a flat screen TV, posh by our standards, but, hey. It was Christmas.

Christmas Day was spent lounging around and enjoying the little platform in front of our bungalow that overhung the bank, but by afternoon there was a contingent of Thai vacationers who set up their tent five feet from our bungalow, had two lively twin boys who ran about as boys will do, and our little platform was covered with their mats and cookout gear.

Personally, I am from Montana and there is an unwritten code of "get out of my face" when camping. You don't invade the space of people who are already camped out, you set up at the other end of the campground, you don't trot over to visit unless you already know them or there are indications that you would not be unwelcome. But that is Montana and this is Thailand and we understood that the cute river platform was the communal picnic table of this particular resort. They were polite and friendly, the boys went to bed at a reasonable time, and all was well, but we decided to kick off to Sangkhom and the aforementioned Bouy Guesthouse of bike tourist fame, and we were certainly glad we did.

The views along the Mekong on this highway are magnificent, there are lots of rocks and riffles and rapids. Grasses tuft the small islands and on the other side can be seen the road in Laos from Paklai to Vientiane. It was very rough and dusty looking at points, with hills that had large trucks and buses groaning up and down and around, we were very glad we had decided not to take it. But we later read that Chris Pountney (The Really Long Way Round) did and that it eventually gets better and paved nearer to Vientiane.

Bouy has little grass shacks along the river bank and beautiful flowers and gardens, the owners are very kind and friendly, and we did not get one thing done we were supposed to, no writing, no napping, no deep thinking while gazing at the river, simply because every few minutes another interesting person would arrive and sit down at a table in the dining area and poof, another three hours would be gone. We have met numerous cyclists, a couple traveling by motorbike, and a Swiss man married to a local woman who invited us out to lunch and to see their new property in the country where there are rubber trees, a new house under construction, and two new lakes being dug while we watched.

Negotiating the funky bridge at Bouy Guesthouse in Sangkhom.

Sunrise from our Bouy Guesthouse bungalow, Sangkhom.

What with all this socializing I am going to delay any deeper observations about our trip along the Mekong until we have done a bit more research on the riverbank operations we've seen. Of course we already have a lot of opinions but it's been a bit difficult to ferret out just what exactly is going on with this great river system and people are fairly close-mouthed or just plain ignorant about what is happening right under their noses, so we'll just keep looking and listening. There are a lot of Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovels at work here, millions of tons of rock, sand, and soil are being moved, and the scale of it becomes more astounding the further we move downstream.

Today's ride: 99 miles (159 km)
Total: 602 miles (969 km)

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