Off road

Well, it had to happen eventually. I've got my first real motorcycle crash under my belt. Don't worry, besides cutting, scraping, bruising and making sore every moving part of my body, the bike is undamaged and therefore retains its full resale value.

Besides being relatively near a mysterious site of questionable archiological value, the town of Phonsavan is nothing to write home about. The man who runs the guesthouse where I stayed however, was rather charming. The night before I left I ended up chatting with a Czech fellow traveling on four dollars a day, and a fellow bike rider named Eldon from Ireland. Eldon and I were heading in the same direction, and we assumed that we'd see each other along the way, but we made no commitments to travel together. As we discussed various routes from Phonsavan to Luang Probang, the guesthouse owner approached us with some Lao Lao, the traditionally homemade Lao version of rice liquor. He was quite proud of his concoction because in addition to simply fermenting rice, he added a combination of local herbs - ones that he claimed were not only medicinal, but that also erased any possibility of a hang over. Good things come in threes, so we had several rounds of the potent red spirit and easily glided upstairs to bed.

Eldon and I ran into each other the next morning for a breakfast of noodles at the market. He had tried to catch sunrise at the plain of jars but got hopelessly lost in the intracate network of local roads surrounding the place. My gear was packed and I left right after eating my noodles (and also after taking an experimental foray into a florescent green rice-jelly-fish-egg-looking dish). We bade each other bon voyage and I was soon on the road. About 45 minutes later, Eldon passed me going about 100km/hr. He was in a hurry to make Nong Khiaw before sunset. I caught up with him at Muang Kham, a little town on the junction of national roads 6 and 7. We turned left, onto road 6 and into some of the most beautiful scenery I've seen yet. This road is newly paved and snakes up and around several mountains. It's not much more than a thousand U-turns connected randomly at their ends. Eldon and I passed each other several times on this road, when one of us would stop to take a break or a photo. The road was narrow and it hugged the mountainside, forever climbing. To the left was a heavily jungled mountain and to the right was a deep, lush valley. Dotting the road every ten or twenty kilometers were tiny villages - no more than fifteen huts each, tempting the precipice with a bold, bamboo-legged balancing act.

It was tempting for me to use the entire road as I drove. On the 95 kilometer stretch of this road, only four or five cars passed in the opposite direction. The only problem is that if a car happened to be on the same left turn as me, and I was hugging the corner, my living license would surely have been prematurely revoked. So I took it relatively slow. Descending the pass, I came upon a left turn that sharpened as it turned. I approached it too fast and began to brake midway through the corner. At the apex of the turn was some loose gravel and a big rock, the size of a large grapefruit. I was too committed to the turn to avoid the rock and the gravel and I hit it squarely with my front tire. The bike skipped as the front end bounced off the pavement. I straightened up, going about 50km/hr to avoid sliding out. Now, making the turn would be impossible. I gently applied the brakes, but could not keep myself on the road. Luckily there was a big, soft drainage ditch running the seam between the mountain and the road. The bike dropped into the grassy, rocky ditch and I felt a sense of relief, thinking that I would be able to ride it out. The ditch acted like a slot car track, forcing my wheels to align to its path. I had probably slowed to 30km/hr at this point (we're talking about a few seconds worth of time in total), when before me appeared a small boulder, about the size of my front tire. I slammed on the brakes, but without much consequence. The bike hit the rock squarely and I was thrown over the handlebars and into the ditch, about ten feet ahead of my bike.

After several stunned seconds in the grass of trying to recalibrate my senses and letting the adrenaline drip out of my lobes, I stood up and assessed the scene. One shoe had gone missing, apparently having eloped with my sunglasses. My bag had come completely off the bike and some of my accessories were strewn about. I cringed at the thought of what damage my bike might have been dealt. It lay on it's side, wheel against the boulder. Front tire was not popped. Nothing appeared to be leaking. I stood it up, got it in neutral and started it up. Vroom. No problem. The front rim looked true and besides a few cosmetic scratches on the plastic front fender, which had completely buckled into itself, the bike was fine. A broken bike at this point of my trip, at this particular location, would have been a very bad thing.

My body was still trembling as I searched the ditch for my shoe. I found it near the road, wedged into a small cluster of adolescent bamboo trees. My elbow, ankle, neck, knees, back and foot were throbbing. Each, in the split second of my tumble, had managed to aquire some small injury. It must have been quite the gymnastic dismount. Everything still moved - and so I declared a small victory over ill-fatedness and began reassembling my possessions. The sunglasses were gone and I was still too shaken up to conduct a thorough search. Without much grace I exited the ditch and began driving towards Thenchong, the next reasonably sized village on the road. I stopped there for water to cleanse my various nicks, cuts and gouges. A woman there was unsatisfied with my triage and called for her husband, dressed all in black, who casually sauntered out to eye the fuss. My elbow was deeply cut and stuffed with dirt. I couldn't stop the bleeding once I had picked and washed the debris out - chalk up one more use for a mechanical pencil. As I elevated and compressed, the man walked off and returned with some freshly picked herbs. He made motions to apply them to the cuts. At first I thought, oh no, no witch doctoring for me. But then I thought of my dad. He would not only happily stuff any random herb into his wounds, he would ask for seconds and probably a branch from the original plant to take home with him. Then he would spend the rest of his days mixing the fruit of that plant into his aloe vera smoothies, gulping each down with a satisfied lip-smack. So I allowed the man to doctor me. He squeezed some juice from the grassy plant into the cut, still bleeding profusely, then stuffed a few leaves directly in. Mmm, that smarted a bit. But a minute later the bleeding stopped. Very many thanks were offered to the medicine man and his twenty-odd crew of teenage and younger interns, and I sped off to the next town of Nam Neun.

There I found Eldon, who had run low on fuel. While I was licking my wounds, he was coasting down the mountain in an attempt to conserve gas. His first aid kit was handy so I antisepted a few of my joints and drank a nice warm Pepsi. We sped off to Phou Lao, a few kilometers down the road to junction onto national road 1. Besides the primary name, this road does not have much to offer those seeking road-like conditions. National road 1 more closely resembles a creek bottom than a driving surface. It took two and a half bumpy, slippery hours to travel the sixty kilometers to Vieng Thong. Here again I met Eldon and we shared a plate of sticky rice and some unidentified meat (water buffalo I suspect). The Lao have many more choices of meat that westerners. In the markets I've seen bats, rats, squirrels and other rodents, different sorts of deer, birds of the endangered variety, water buffalo, and dogs. I think that no matter how thinly covered in meat, any animal is a potential game prize. I'm sure the scenery on road 1 was lovely, but all of my concentration was keenly spent keeping my vehicle upright. I also had the chicken problem. There's something unusual about Lao chickens. Most animals on the road are fairly predictable - upon hearing or seeing the motorbike, they will either run in the direction they are pointed or they will run away from the bike. Chickens are totally unpredictable. From the edge of the road, they will spin round and run directly under your tire. Almost as if they know that their lives are doomed, considering suicide the only proactive choice they can make to outwit their Kentucky-fried fate. Proudly I have yet to kill a chicken (or a piglet - also a bit of an erratic road crosser) mostly because I couldn't bear facing the double row of farm kids that would invariably witness the gruesome execution.

National road 1 turned into a real road after Vieng Thong. I missed my left turn, about 100km later and realized it about 50km after that. Road signs? Heh, no. So I ended up in Nong Khiaw at the sunset guesthouse. This was a recommendation of Susan Garrett a very nice woman whom I met via the internet. She had done a long solo journey throughout Laos and Thailand last year and had emailed me tons of advice about where to stay and which roads were good, etc. She's a popular woman. I've dropped her name on several occasions and was warmly received afterwards. Nong Khiaw is the kind of place that people plan to stay at for a couple days and stay for a couple of weeks. Mr Church, at the Sunset, hooked us up with simple rooms, yummy pancakes, and even had a very nice buddhist good-luck ceremony on our last night there. The group I became temporarily friends with included a Frenchwoman, a Swede, a Dane, an Irishman, an Argentinian, two Kiwis, and a partridge in a pear tree. We ate Lao style with his family and did some chanting and lit some candles. It doesn't really work in translation, but the vibe was good and the old folks were really cute in that good-natured grandparently way.

Nong Khiaw is on a river that feeds into the Mekong. You can walk on foot paths which trace the river to small, isolated, sandy beaches and take swims in relatively clean sections of the river, unpolluted by proximity to town. Rivers, though... they're gross. I'm an ocean person. I don't like the feeling of my feet squishing down into a slimy, muddy river bottom. And rivers are basically nature's sewers. Every waste-related, runned off thing ends up in a river. I'll put just about any food-thing into my mouth, but I draw the line at river water. Most of the guest houses in Laos pump the shower water from the river. Stoked.

Today I woke up early and back tracked to my turn-off. I've got my Lao phrase book so I've been making more of an effort to learn a bit of the language. Stuff like, "this beer is very expensive" and other catalysts of cultural exchange. I managed to handle all of my direction-asking in Lao, with some success. People just dig it when you speak their language, even if you don't make any sense at all. The road from Sam Soun (a tiny hamlet that was my turnoff point) and Pak Xeng follows a mountain ridge. The views would be spectacular if not for the clear cutting of the forest on both sides. Thousands of acres are being burnt to make room for farming. I couldn't help but wonder what crops could be planted and harvested on sixty-degree slopes. This fire road, and the villages along it are about as remote as it gets in Laos. At least 150km of tough road from the nearest thing you'd call a town. The road, generally in good condition, tends to fall apart on its steepest aproaches. This makes for some challenging riding and some rewarding pit stops.

Pak Xeng had a gas station. Oh have I described a gas station yet? It's two fifty gallon barrels. One is diesel and one is petrol. Each is topped with a graduated glass cylinder which holds five litres. Below the cylinder is a hand crank which draws fuel from the barrel into the cylinder. A plastic tube below the crank delivers the fuel to your tank with the opening of a hand operated valve at the top. By opening and closing the valve at the right time, fuel can accurately be dispensed in quarter-litre increments. The barrels are usually housed in a wooden shack, next to the owner's home, usually on one end of the village. Small villages do not have gas stations. Large villages will sometimes have two. The competition there must be intense. One man had very neatly branded his station with red, yellow and white paint as a Shell outlet. He did a good job too. All hand painted, with the Shell trademark and logotype in Helvetica and everything. I gave him a double thumbs up as I rode by. Pak Xeng also had a restaurant. Fancy! I stopped and ordered the only dish on the menu - pork pho. Not just any old piece of pork though - only the choicest bits - intestine, heart and liver. As I ate I could hear the source material oinking and rooting around in the river runoff behind me. That's called keeping it real.

Now I'm in Luang Prabang, a lovely old city in the heart of Laos. A couple days of recuperation here should settle my motoring debts and prepare me for the trip upto the Chinese border. I have vague directions to a small guesthouse just outside a small town, just outside a small city in the northeastern corner of Laos. That will be my last stop in this awestrikingly beautiful country.