December 21, 2014
Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me
Starving and striving
Sayaburi to Nam Pui 34Nam Pui to Paklai 65Paklai to Ban Pak Huai 46
Dear little friends,
It is the winter solstice here at the 'umble Porpeang Resort, our six-dollar room will be heating up soon and we have loads of things you wouldn't ordinarily think of washing out drying on the south facing porch in the dry heat. Helmets. Gloves. Shoes. Here in the northwest corner of northeast Thailand there is little smoke, no karaoke, nobody blasting Communist or Buddhist monologues from several tinny loudspeakers at once. There is cheap fruit at the market, and lattes and ice cream in the guesthouse lobby. Things are looking up.
We are completely exhausted.
Our trip south from Sayaburi was interesting and beautiful but very taxing, many many many hills, some with tail winds and many without. Gorgeous karst mountains, gorgeous new green rice fields, lovely little roofed huts to stop and rest in.
People who just love to cycle would love it there, truly, the road is new and nice and the scenery stunning. If you enjoy being a celebrity you'll enjoy grinding up the hill out of the village while literally every single person who catches sight of you calls first "Falang!" to each other, and then "Sabaidee!" to you and then if you return the greeting, collapses in helpless laughter, as if they had addressed a monkey and it responded in kind.
We know we are quite a sight, two old foreigners on funny bikes toiling up a hill that they walk every day, usually with a huge log or a water bucket on their shoulder. But still. It gets tiring.
Sadly, we look at the jungle with brand new red dirt roads into it, going toward areas that are supposedly "National Protected Areas". We see lots of sawmills and furniture makers, big trucks that only drive at night, gigantic round tables and stools in restaurants made of solid old-growth hardwoods, and there is only one thing to surmise, Laos is being raped.
It's not like we didn't know this already, it just hurts to see it.
There are a million big new Toyota and Lexus pickups flying around. There are a lot of people sitting around doing nothing, which would be why our arrival in the village would be cause for entertainment. The quiet muddy road of 2008 is now blasted through by Chinese trucks, so you'll want to come soon before they completely trash the half inch of new asphalt. I think that good roads improve things for people, not just bicyclists but rural people who can now afford to get their extra rice to market, using the tuologgi that may well end up being traded in for a pickup someday. I do not believe it's best to let people remain subsistence farmers, especially now that most of their kids survive to adulthood because they have mosquito nets and free purified drinking water. I do think things are better for the local people but there are other changes that need to accompany this new affluence and I don't see how they are going to be able to make them happen.
In Sayaburi there were over 300 channels on our guest house television, not one of them a serious news channel in English. There were Chinese, Iranian, and North Korean channels, however. There were 200 channels from Thailand alone, mostly about food, music, farming, shopping, food, skin whitening, informercials, soap operas, the king, Buddhism, Islam, food, fashion, and more shopping. The two Lao stations had Lao singing and dancing. They are very cute stations but there is certainly no news whatsoever, no newspapers to speak of, no Lao magazines or reading material anywhere it seems. Disgraceful.
Unlike in Myanmar where many people spoke English and were eager to talk about their lives and the complexities thereof, in Laos we weren't even asked where we were from, we could have said the Death Star and it would have been greeted with the same blankness. They would slip into the back of the store or restaurant until they heard Bruce address them in Lao, and then they would return, greatly relieved. They stood a long time debating whether to overcharge us for the bananas or not. They never, ever had change for even the smallest bill, and ran off to the neighbors' to get some. Every. Single. Time. They had been selling coffee all morning, where was all that money?
These are things that are kind of amusing on the first or second day, but we were tired, hungry, thirsty, and sleep-deprived so it really stopped being funny and was just irritating. There were of course many friendly, kind people, who fed us their noodle soup (the only thing safe to eat that we could ever find) and were sad we didn't take the beautiful fresh lettuce and herbs served with it (we had no way of knowing whether it was rinsed in the purified water or not). Their vegetable gardens were immaculate and orderly, the only thing in the country that way, it seemed.
As a traveler, you get out of it what you put into it. Sometimes the difficulty of the journey itself whether by bicycle or bouncing bus or illness jaundices your view of things and makes your experience much less objective and open than it could be. It really seems hard to me to penetrate what is going on in Laos, but in my view their government is just as insidiously terrible or even more so than Myanmar's, they just keep a lot more quiet about it, and it's a smaller, less-populated, poorer country. Somebody explained to us on this trip that human rights abuses in Laos will probably be tolerated by our government as long as China extends their no-strings-attached largesse to countries like Laos, in order to keep some influence in the region.
Our second day out from Sayaburi we were tired and it was cold and we had decided to catch a songthaew, but somehow we just started riding up the hills out of Nam Pui and at some point we realized that Paklai was only 20 miles away and we ended up riding our longest day ever, 65 miles! That was a great accomplishment, thanks to the beautiful tailwinds and nice little rest stops we took, including a restaurant in the middle of nowhere that served the best khao pad (fried rice) we'd ever had. Oh, and a Pepsi, we really needed that, something we wouldn't dream of drinking at home.
Paklai has this old funny guesthouse on the river that we like and we still like it, but we didn't like the deafening karaoke that lasted until 2 am, with the monks and propaganda loudspeakers taking up the slack two hours later. Sorry, Paklai, but that is a big fail.
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We left the next morning because there didn't seem to be any rest available for a rest day, and took off for the border. That was a long hot day with hills and headwinds that wouldn't quit.
In Kenthao, almost there, we were ordered to halt by a lady who hollered, "HEY!"
"YOU NEED COFFEE!"
Why yes, yes we did need coffee. She swiftly made us up two Tung Yai style iced coffee bags which we notice are all the rage now everywhere here, which hung from our handlebars and fueled us the last few miles to the border crossing. Our swinging coffee bags were of some amusement to the immigration folks who let us through with little drama, we crossed to the left side of the road, and into Thailand and down the road where suddenly everything seemed cleaner, easier, safer, and cheaper.
Our little bungalow has a lot of cats and dogs and a rice field next door and a truck-washing business and people go into the guesthouse lobby to eat pastries and drink coffee while their vehicles are scrubbed inside and out. It's very peaceful here on a Sunday morning, we rode out to buy bananas and the best papaya in the world. Our bed is like concrete but we have Thermarest pads, we have quiet, we have nobody around us singing or talking or creaking a creaky door or smoking a cigarette. There was only one problem last night. We had just consumed about 16 ounces of iced coffee super-charged with Ovaltine and sweetened condensed milk. Apparently the sleep part of our rest day was postponed until tonight. So let the snoring begin. Night night.
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Today's ride: 145 miles (233 km)
Total: 503 miles (810 km)
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