Checking for Dollaria

February 1, 2015

Who are these people riding vast distances?

Don Det to Stung Treng 47

Stung Treng to Krong Preah Vihear 89

Dear little friends,

I think one of the aspects of bicycle travel I am enjoying the most is the ability to leave when we damn well feel like leaving. We enjoy a spot and stay a few days and then suddenly we want to get the hell out of there, and in the morning we get up early and load our bikes and down the sandy trail we go, no bus ticket, no tuk-tuk to the station, just us and our sandy chains a-grinding.

That's how we left Don Det, because even island paradises can cloy. The heat had been increasing, the internet decreasing, and we decided to get up early, around the time the chickens start walking around under our bungalow at 5:30 or so. We rode across the old French bridge to Don Khone, avoiding the ticket sellers and their stupidly expensive fee, and rode to the very south of the island. We knew boats took tourists out into the Mekong below the big falls to see Irrawaddy dolphins, the rarest of the rare, if they wanted to be seen, that is. And we knew there was a small village on the east bank that had a road to the main highway to the border. But nobody seemed to know if the boats would take us to that village.

A misty morning road on Don Khone island.

When we got the south end of Don Khone, there was the sun, and the vast expanse of the Mekong.

Of course they would, and they would throw in a little dolphin stop for no extra charge. A boatman helped us drag our bags and bikes down to his boat and off we went shortly after sunrise. We did stop and look for dolphins but when they declined to appear we waved the boatman off again, we have seen them before near Kratie, Cambodia, and also up in Myanmar.

Down the stairs to the boat. This edifice is an old loading dock the French built at the end of a now-defunct railway. It was designed to route cargo around the huge waterfalls on the Mekong.

It was six years ago on the Irrawaddy between Bhamo and Katha, towns that both vie for the title of Nobody Goes There, on a boat full of Burmese that navigates the beautiful gorge. At a certain point the captain suddenly cut the engine which alarmed us because we naturally figured it was broken and we were going to capsize as we got swept down the river but no, all the passengers started oohing and aah-ing and they all turned to us and made sure we got a good view of the dolphins surfacing and rolling around in the river. We took blurry photos of the backs of dolphins, but even more engaging than seeing extremely rare animals were the happy faces of our fellow passengers who were delighted to see how delighted we were to see them. It was a magic moment.

The boat to Veunkham. No dolphins were sighted.

Magic aside, I wish people would just leave the dolphins alone, so we did, we continued on to Veunkham, unloaded our treasure, and contemplated the steep sandy bank and the steeper stairs up to the landing. Dang.

Up the hill, up the hill I went with some of the panniers. Up the hill, up the hill came Bruce with my bike, then his bike, then the rest of the panniers. He has since been forbidden such labors.

Up the hill, up the hill. Bruce volunteered to bring both bikes and the rest of the bags. He has since retired from such ridiculous behavior.

A short ride on a new blacktop road got us to Highway 13, the one and only time in Laos we rode on it except for maybe half a mile back in Luang Prabang. Soon we came to the Cambodian border and prepared for hassle. Yep, there was hassle. First the Lao charged us a mysterious 22,000 kip fee which we initially refused to pay. Then somebody said "overtime fee" because it was a Sunday. Ah, yes, the overtime fee.

Then the Cambodians make you pay to get a guy who claims to be a doctor point something at your neck. The sign says something about eradicating malaria, which last I heard is not contagious via human contact but, hey. The doc said it was to screen us for ebola, which last I heard has not been diagnosed in Laos but, hey. A dollar for that. Let's call this fee what it is: Cambodians screening for Dollaria.

Also a visa fee sign with the fee in kip and baht but not in dollars. We happen to know the fee is $30 but they asked for $35. $30 for the visa and $5 "for the stamp". They would not give me back change when I tried to pay in baht. We ended up not winning that one either, but paid with a motley assortment of dollar bills and spare kip. We like to think we gave them our share of crap for the obvious corruption and gouging but in the end, you have to get the stamp, move on, and leave them to a delightful existence in a shack by the road stealing money from travelers who don't have to live in Cambodia.

Our own delightful morning of riding turned into a very hot afternoon on Highway 7, which was brand new six years ago and now looked pretty lunar. Pro tip to road constructors everywhere: one inch of asphalt isn't enough. I was feeling a bit weak and Bruce was not even though he had been carrying bikes and panniers like Hercules. Heading into Stung Treng we met a few cyclists coming the opposite way, and we stopped and traded road information.

We inadvertently crashed a convention of mattress dealers.

The Cambodians were inactively burning down their landscape to tidy up a little. I say inactively because beyond casually throwing down the lit match there was no other supervision or guidance of the fires, they just burned the way the wind wanted them to. Large ashes floated down on our heads, smoke and flames sometimes crept scarily close to the road. It was really hot, did I say that already?

Stung Treng is at the confluence of two rivers, the Mekong and the San, both of which are large. The San riverfront is long, and there are lots of little food and drink vendors. In Stung Treng we awoke every morning listening to a guy sawing up ice with a circular saw and then feeding it into an ice grinder that sounded like it was doing a "Fargo", or another guy on a motorbike tootling around selling river clams and playing a plaintive tune with one final flat note that still haunts my dreams.

Bruce wrangles a catfish in Stung Treng.

I had a sore throat and an earache so we were stranded in Stung Treng for a day longer than we wished to be. Our guesthouse lobby doubled as a rice warehouse and carved wood furniture emporium but it was a pretty good place, still, it is a lot of fun after a stranding to get up before the ice sawing begins and skip town, we had a new bridge to cross and a new highway to ride, straight east and then south toward Siem Reap, 200 miles away.

Our guesthouse lobby in Stung Treng doubled as a rice warehouse.

The brand spankin' new bridge over the Mekong at Stung Treng.

The longest bridge across the Mekong, it just opened in August of 2014.

Here is where we say goodbye to the Mekong after following it for over 1500 miles. It's been a marvelous roadmap and watery companion.

There's an interesting thing to remember about a new road and that is that it is a new road. There had been a very isolated dirt road through the jungle before but now it was paved, hurrah!The asphalt, while a bit rough for my gold standard, was still flawless and un-potholed, although we saw some puzzling new repairs. You might want to ride it soon before the inch of slightly rough asphalt becomes gouged like its Highway 7 cousin.

Other amenities are lacking, such as villages, stores, restaurants, guest houses. Big adventurers like us should not care about such effete niceties, right? We had water, we had peanuts, we had oranges, we had a tent. Oh, that's so easy for you to say from the comfort of your swiveling office chair. Let's just drop a few hints about our camping prospects: Wildfire. Land mines. No temples. We did stop in a small town, Chhaep, which claimed to have a guesthouse but if we saw it we did not recognize it as such. So on we went. Thus a new record was born for the two who nearly died in Myanmar after riding 20 miles on our first day. These two wimps rode 89 miles from Stung Treng to Krong Preah Vihear. Thank you, Cambodia for smashing the speed of time and space for us by granting us a new road, an east tailwind, and no hills. We rock.

Huge tropical hardwoods turned into lumber everywhere, even by the road.

Krong Preah Vihear provided us with a room that had a shower and a palatial bed carved out of one of the huge trees that had been laid waste out by the highway. It also had no ventilation whatsoever, not a good thing for somebody with breathing issues who, while showered and exhausted, nevertheless lay awake wondering when we would run out of oxygen. There is no rest for the wicked or the vain, I could hardly wait for morning so we could steal away once again. There were no chickens walking around or ice being sawed but nevertheless, we would be out of there by sunrise if it meant I had to stay wide awake and breathless to see it.

This preposterous bed is made of one piece of wood.

Today's ride: 136 miles (219 km)
Total: 1,347 miles (2,168 km)

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Jen Rahn89 miles in one day?! A feat of strength!!
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5 years ago

Andrea BrownTo Jen RahnWe will probably never do that again but it’s fun to know that we did.
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5 years ago