Turning the Corner of the Bowl

January 1, 2015

And looking for the baby rhino

Sangkhom to Nong Khai 54

Nong Khai to Phon Phisai 28

Dear little friends,

The problem with traveling along sweet little river towns is that you never want to leave.

We got up early and stopped for a noodle soup, which is the standard breakfast in these parts, if you want a western breakfast your eggs will be greasy and your bread will be white, so we have started collecting noodle soups. Each cook makes theirs slightly differently, maybe there is a spicy ground pork, or maybe a collection of pork balls and chicken, or maybe just shredded chicken. Often there are a lot of mystery meat products that get pushed to a corner of the bowl if a bowl can be said to have corners. The unifying features are a bubbling broth, and each one is slightly different, then some rice noodles that are put in boiling water to soften before being dumped in your bowl and the broth added, then the meat, then other lovely things like green onions or garlic. A plate with fresh herbs or limes or lettuce is placed alongside at the table.

You take your chopsticks and get everything in the bowl mixed together and heated up, put a bit of chili paste on top, try to gauge the cleanliness of the herb plate before adding any of that, and dig in. Eating noodles with chopsticks is not a dainty art and I seem to make it even less dainty than most but in the end the noodles are inside me and the broth taken with a spoon. The soup cooks take a lot of pride in their product, it is rare that we leave without a compliment for her.

Fortified with soup we headed east, over a couple of jungle-covered hills and then down onto what will be a long stretch of Isan flatness. Isan is the NE part of Thailand, dominated by Lao language speakers, it has its own beautiful morlam music, its own cuisine, and its own Thai-Lao dialect.

The Mekong has more inland fishery production than any other river system in the world, including the giant catfish.

After some time we were in Sri Chiang Mai, which has a very long and forlorn promenade on the river looking across to the capital of Laos, Vientiane. Vientiane looks a bit more bustling than before and there has been a bit of building that made most of the waterfront unrecognizable to us. We miss Vientiane and won't be visiting there, but some of what we love about it has already gone, the old morning market has been torn down and replaced with a ghastly structure, the streets that used to be dirt are now teeming with motorbikes. Maybe next time.

The promenade in Sri Chiang Mai was deserted, but there was a beautiful temple gate.

As we sadly looked at Vientiane we came across a coffee place and sat down for iced coffee and to eat the papaya we had bought along the roadside. It was a good papaya and so was the coffee, good enough to send us beyond Sri Chiang Mai and on to Nong Khai.

This ancient temple on the way to Nong Khai was beautiful but quickly losing the battle with gravity.

The once peaceful 211 was now getting really busy, the shoulder getting really narrow, and it was a relief to escape along some minor riverside roads through sleepy Thai towns and big tobacco fields. We caught up with the French family we had met at Bouy who are traveling with three little girls by bicycle. The two youngest are in a bike trailer and the oldest is on a bike that hooks onto her mother's, they are delightful children. When we saw them again they were headed to Tha Bo for the night, the curly-haired toddler was having a siesta in the bike trailer, draped over her patient but probably sweaty sister.

This part of Thailand has a lot of this sort of thing, additions to the spirit houses of small statues, it predates Buddhism, appeasing spirits and seeking their protection. We saw several very large roadside shrines filled with many large horse statues, people honk their horns as they drive by and we thought they were honking at us until we caught on. Now we jingle our bike bells as we pass them. 'Cause you never know.

"Hey, here come two cyclists. Let's get 'em!"

Even the riverside road was getting busy by the time we arrived in Nong Khai. I have a soft spot for Nong Khai, it is the town you go to to get to Laos via the first bridge on the Mekong, aptly named The Friendship Bridge. There are several more Friendship Bridges now and more being built, pretty soon they will have more friendship than Facebook. On my first trip to Asia I met Bruce in Bangkok, where he had just returned after three weeks in Myanmar with his brother. I had not slept the night before I flew to Bangkok, out of sheer excitement and terror at taking an international flight by myself. I did not sleep on the plane. I did not sleep that first night in Bangkok because of severe jet lag and sheer excitement at being in Bangkok. I didn't sleep the second night there either, nor did I sleep on the first class sleeper train to Nong Khai. That morning on the train, I peeped out of the window at my first dawn over the rice fields and rural crossroads, kids were going to school on motorbikes, lotuses bloomed in ponds and in a huge mud puddle I saw.. what did I see?

Open-mouthed, I turned to Bruce and gasped, "I think I saw a baby rhino!"

Whenever we see water buffalo that line gets trotted out. Perhaps I was hallucinatory from no sleep. In any case, we reached the lovely Mut-Mee guesthouse, where we had a wooden and thatched roof little bungalow with a shower floor of loose stones and a hard bed with a mosquito net. Bruce was meticulously tucking in the net around me and telling me something and I was answering and he says suddenly mid-sentence I went silent. After five days of no sleep nature had mercy on me and shut 'er down. That's what Nong Khai means to me. It was my first taste of the Thailand that is floral and restful. In the morning there were bird calls and roosters and somewhere thudding inside my sternum next to my heart, the deep boom of a neighborhood temple drum.

Old Thai provincial architecture with both British and French influences even though Thailand was always free of colonial rule.

We looked in on Mut-mee while we were in Nong Khai but the New Year had it booked up solid. Our old bungalow was still there but in a bit of dilapidation, and the rest of the place is out of our budget, so we stayed at another old wooden place with paper-thin walls.

We had been yearning for this grilled chicken and som tam place in Nong Khai, and so happy to see that it was still there.

Nong Khai was full and busy with Thai tourists, the only westerners seemed to be either residents that are married to Thai women, or cycle tourists. Apparently this route we are on is like the Camino de Santiago for Dutch cycle tourists. We took the time to eat well and wander a bit, but on New Year's Eve morning we were told that our guesthouse was also fully booked so we went out on bikes to find another place. There were a couple of rooms available after 11 am or so, so back to our room to pack up and move, which we did in record time, we finally have gotten this once disorderly business streamlined now. In order to get to the new guesthouse with our loaded bikes we had to go some extra distance because of the one-way streets and we found ourselves waiting to cross the street with our loaded bikes.

Nong Khai tuk tuks lined up to take passengers anywhere within the town.

"We should just go left," Bruce said.

"No, we go straight, then right," said Miss-State-The-Obvious.

If we went left, we would end up on the highway to Phon Phisai, our next town. It was New Year's Eve. Nong Khai was going to be noisy and obnoxious that evening. The streets were already filling with tourists, the karaoke places testing their mikes. The tray food place by the hospital was closed for the holiday. Small disappointments but small things add up. It's kind of a giddy moment when you can look up and down the street and know that each different direction will mean a completely different kind of day.

"Okay."

And off we went. Talk about pure freedom. No tuk-tuk to the bus station. No waiting for the bus to come, or to fill. Just leave. We stopped at a grove of trees out of town to change and put on sunscreen, to load up my pants pocket with toilet paper (crucial) and tie on my dust/sun protector bandanna and find my gloves. What else did we need? We already had everything right there in our panniers.

Yes, we eventually had to rejoin a four-lane highway with a headwind, but there is going to be a bit of that on this trip. You can't always find a backroad in the tobacco fields. We put our heads down and pushed on and now we are in Phon Phisai, a town with a very beautiful waterfront, and the best thing of all: a restaurant that serves khao soi, the best curry in the world, a long way from its Chiang Mai stomping grounds. And it was good khao soi, some of the best we've ever had. We may never leave! We are also staying in a solid concrete Chinese-style hotel, the kind with stairs so steep you feel like your room is on Everest. Thick walls. Hot, hot water.

The promenade in Phon Phisai has some very glamorous nagas.

Big Buddha statue facing east and the Mekong River. Phon Phisai

New Year's Eve at the Khao Soi place on the promenade in Phon Phisai.

Around eight in the evening the neighbors were quietly drinking and playing sweet, sweet morlam music that drifted into our open window. The sidewalks of this town were rolled up tight, everybody was home with their families. The music stopped and the neighborhood temple monks were chanting and I was in bed feeling like I had been awake for five days and now I could finally rest. The baby rhino tiptoed down the streets of Phon Phisai, and when I woke up, it was 2015.

Today's ride: 82 miles (132 km)
Total: 684 miles (1,101 km)

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