December 15, 2014
Slipping Through Spokes
Slipping Through Spokes
We decided to take the slow (rough) road from Luang Prabang south because it followed close to the Mekong River and we both love the Mekong. The road was actually nicely paved the first 25 kilometers and then turned to hard packed clay - not as dusty as I imagined it would be. I would hate to ride on the clay in the rainy season though, because the tires would probably just spin and slide. But the clay had dried up and become hard packed for about a month. At times it felt like we were riding on greenware pottery. If it could only be fired in place the road would never have to be paved!
The road was a roller coaster. It dipped down to cross many little tributaries to the Mekong. We sped down steep hills to clatter across rickety wooden bridges many times but soon the bridges petered out and fording the streams was the norm. This time of year the streams are not deep and it was no big deal. Most of them we rode right through without even getting our feet wet. We lost count how many little streams we splashed through but it was a lot! On the opposite side of every stream the road went seemingly straight up.
Sometimes there were steep hills we flew down with no stream at all at the bottom which then made it a true roller coaster game of trying to maintain enough momentum to successfully top the other side. It rarely happened and turned out to be a real workout of a road.
But the scenery was gorgeous. Almost never did the road run at the same level as the Mekong. The Mekong still floods and the road builders wisely positioned the road up the bank a bit which affords nice views of the river. That stretch of the Mekong has lots of huge jagged rocks and the main stream among them is very narrow which means it must be very deep. The upwellings and whirlpools suggested as much. When the water in the Mekong is especially swirly the locals say that it’s caused by a Naga’s tail (mythic river serpents) and when boating over such areas great caution should be taken. Best would be to throw some rice into the river to appease the Nagas.
If we could have appeased the land serpents, and it seemed very much like we were riding on the back of a Naga, we would have gladly spilled a few peanuts on the road. We had lots to spare because for some unknown reason our provisions consisted of: roasted, salted peanuts with the red coverings still attached, roasted, unsalted peanuts with no coverings, roasted red peanuts with kaffir lime leaves inside the bag and peanut brittle. Why we were so well stocked in the peanut category I’ll never know. We knew there would be no stores of any kind for nearly fifty miles but all I could think of was peanuts. We did have a few oranges and quite a bit of water as well.
The rice from all the little multilevel paddies surrounding Naga Road, (my naming), had been harvested leaving brown stubble. People were on to harvesting Job's Tears, a grain. They are very hard seeds in clusters at the top of tall stalks which resemble corn plants. The field workers all stopped to smile at us as we, odd looking people on odd looking bikes, passed. The weather was perfect with no heat or humidity and a sun that didn’t make an appearance through the fog until late morning. Many species of butterflies were everywhere and sometimes circled us as we rode. One time a white butterfly flew through the spokes of my front wheel! How did it do that? That was quite a feat and left me wondering for quite some time until a dry brown teak leaf flying like a kite through the air moved my mind to other things.
Since most of the old-growth teak has been logged in all three of the countries we’ve already visited there was a bit of a planting frenzy about ten years ago in Laos, thirty years ago in Thailand when the king ordered it and if it has happened in Myanmar at all it wasn’t long ago.
We rode next to lots of the young stands of teak wedged between the road and the river. Teak grows quickly and the trees were already twenty feet tall. They plant the trees very close together in order to force them to grow straight. If left to grow naturally teak will ramble vertically all over the place but if light is limited it will grow incredibly straight.
Teak trees have enormous thick leaves which, during the winter dry season, (now) dry up, turn brown and fall. The sound of a teak leaf hitting the ground is beyond noticeable. It’s a crash. I’m not sure what the equivalent would be. Maybe it would be like a three foot potato chip dropped from twenty feet. Or, a three foot piece of extra strength double thickness aluminum foil dropped from above. Some of them sail a bit before crashing on the ground. If they hit other teak leaves on the ground or in the trees, it is even more audible. If a teak leaf falls in the forest it definitely makes a sound whether anyone is there to hear it or not. At least that is my belief.
And, staying on the topic of sayings.... We passed through several small villages and two or three times I didn't so much question why the chicken crossed the road as much as why the chicken had to cross the road just then! I very nearly hit a dog and a little girl as well when they stopped right in front of me in the road looking the opposite direction. I didn't think I was that silent with all my huffing and puffing.
After fifteen miles of pavement and sixteen miles of the clay roller coaster Naga spine, we were worn down. It was a great course for getting in shape but we obviously were not in shape yet. We knew we were not going to make it another sixteen miles to Muang Nan, which had a guest house, so we started to look at the stands of teak with a different eye - Stealth Camping.
Technically you are not supposed to camp in Laos. Being that I never see police in Laos I wasn’t worried one bit about being caught but I was a bit worried about drunks, the too friendly, the ultra curious interested in the details of every single thing we had with us. We just didn’t want to deal with all of that in our Naga Road-worn-out-state so if we were going to stealth camp it would have to be perfectly stealthy to the point of no one at all seeing us slip into the forest.
We checked out one spot but it was just above a backwater of the Mekong and there were mosquitoes. It just didn’t feel right either.
The second site, a little further on, was ideal. It was higher above the Mekong, had no mosquitoes, had a nice flat area for the tent and a huge stand of bamboo blocked the road from view for the most part. When no one was on the road we quickly pushed our loaded bikes over hundreds of shattering and crunching-loudly teak leaves. Once in, we carefully cleared teak leaves, one by one, from where we wanted to pitch the tent and then we waited for the sun to go down. Contrary to popular belief there are still some birds left in Laos. (Mostly they have been hunted and eaten.) We sat and listened to some of the most beautiful bird songs we had ever heard, exotic amazing sounds, some so strange we thought they might be monkeys.
| Heart | 1 | Comment | 0 | Link |
Lots of field workers walked home on the road even well after dark so we really had to be quiet while pitching. Finally, all settled inside the tent, we saw so many stars the sky lit up between the straight teak trees. Lulled by rapids in the Mekong, tired muscles, crickets and frogs we finally sort of fell asleep. I knew that no one could sneak up on us through the teak leaves covering the forest floor but I felt uneasy that someone might stumble upon us and be so bewildered that they would not be able to process it in their minds. With my limited knowledge of the Lao language I thought I might be able to explain what we were doing but fear of the unknown persisted; something one has to deal with when stealth camping.
It was a long night. Sometime in the middle of it I was sound asleep when Andrea woke me to inform me that someone was chopping down trees! What!!!? My heart immediately raced. I listened to the thud of the axe not too close but not too far from us either. I thought that anyone having to cut down a tree in the middle of a moonless night without the use of even a flashlight must be someone we shouldn’t meet. We froze in fear as we listened to that axe and I thought of the look on Jack Nicholson's face in The Shining.
One time, in an act of reverse eco-terrorism, I planted a tree in the middle of a moonless night. It was a mimosa tree that needed to be free of its pot.
Next to Andrea’s rental house in Portland is another rental house with a laggardly owner. I knew he would never initiate the planting of a street tree. I also knew he was so unobservant and incurious that he would never even know or care if a tree sprang up in front of his house. If anything, he might think one of his tenants planted it but most likely he would never even notice.
It was in the middle of winter, raining of course, around 1AM when I decided the time was right. With a straight edged shovel I slit the grass in a big ‘X’ and peeled back the sod carefully. I had a bucket to hold the soil I dug and in no more than four minutes the tree was planted and the grass rolled back. It looked like it had been growing there for a year. No one ever knew and now the mimosa is huge and beautiful and shades a wide area of both street and yard.
But I have never felt the need to cut down a tree in the middle of the night -moon or no moon. That guy was up to no good and we were shaking in our sleeping bags. Scenarios swirled silently in both our minds. If a teak poacher were to stumble on two foreigners in a tent along the Mekong in that wild area, who knows what he would do. And we didn’t have any Lao whiskey with which to barter our lives.
Many times in the past I’ve thought that if teak is so valuable poaching must happen all the time especially right next to a huge river such as the Mekong. Small boats ply the river all night and there are portable saw mills that pop up here and there on the riverbank. Boards, especially teak boards, are obviously a hot commodity. I should have thought about it all before choosing a teak forest to camp in.
What I couldn’t figure out was why he was using an axe and not a more silent saw. We also never heard a tree fall, which was odd. Maybe we were too afraid to hear a tree fall in the woods. If a teak tree is felled in the woods by a poacher do the foreigners shaking in fear in their tent hear it? That’s the question.
All we could do was wait and hope that he didn’t scout out the stand in which we were lying. Eventually the chopping stopped and we didn’t hear anyone coming our way crunching teak leaves underfoot. The rest of the night we strained our ears but all we heard was the dew dropping on the dry teak leaves large as platters on the ground. A dew drop on a dry teak leaf is loud and multiplied dozens of times every minute made for quite an interesting night; nerve-racking I guess one might say. As soon as the first bird sang and light was filtering down we packed up and were out of there faster than a teak leaf can drop from a branch and shatter on the ground.
Other than it being so dangerous (teak poachers paradise), the camping spot had been perfect!
We got back on the roller coaster road before the sun was up and after a dozen or more fords of streams and tough uphills, but always rewarded with beautiful views of the Mekong, and after passing several beautiful tiny hamlets where every inhabitant was awestruck smiling, waving with “Sabaidees" all around, we re-entered civilization - the small town of Muang Nan.
| Heart | 1 | Comment | 0 | Link |
| Heart | 2 | Comment | 2 | Link |
5 years ago
| Heart | 2 | Comment | 0 | Link |
It was shortly after noon and we were just in time for some noodle soup at the guest house. It was the typical noodle soup with thinly sliced pieces of pork and loads of green fixings on the table as we desired. But there were also octopus tentacles! I thought, ‘Hmmm….how far are we from the ocean? Laos is still landlocked isn’t it? Hmmm…’ But no illness came. We lucked out again. The rest of that day I said repeatedly to Andrea, “Octopus?”
It was nice the teak poacher didn’t cut off our heads with his axe so we could live another day to wonder about octopus in a land-locked, third-world country and just how that butterfly slipped through the moving spokes of a twenty-inch bicycle wheel. Ah, to live one more day.
Lovebruce
| Rate this entry's writing | Heart | 2 |
| Comment on this entry | Comment | 1 |
Glad you didn't get decapitated by the poacher. Or .. maybe you DID get decapitated, and that's why you didn't hear any falling trees(??)
Your heads were probably magically re-attached by the Spirit of the Stealth Mimosa.
5 years ago