Cycling north over the Cambodian border back into Thailand was the hardest day's cycling to date. That's official, as measured by the Denyze scale of tiredness. The rain of the previous night had turned the dirt road into a mud track and progress was slowed by mud building up between the wheels of the bike and the mudguards. At times this would stop the wheels turning and we would have to dislodge it with a stick... or our fingers. Terribly messy. What fun!!
The worst sections of the day were where they had ripped up the road completely as they were in the process of relaying it and also the climb up to the border post in O'smach which saw us frequently off and pushing the bike, while being overtaken by trucks and motos. By the way, if you have ever thought of emulating Ewan McGreagor and Charlie Boorman, you don't need a BMW GS motorbike, you just need a Honda Dream moped. Even 14 year old girls were throwing them through mud filled ditches that looked like they could have been an obstacle on Junior Kickstart.
We rolled into Prasat two very tired and hungry cyclists, with Den once again suffering from heatstroke. Checked into the Leelawadee guesthouse for a well deserved rest day.
This day was spent debating the merits of various routes into laos, finally in the end we decided that with Den suffering heat stroke at the drop of a hat due to the effectiveness of me as a windbreak, a cheat was in order. So a traumatic train journey from Surin to Nong Khai was seen as the best of the avaliable options. We had to change trains in Nakon Ratchasima with a lay over of 10 hours. Only our 10 hours turned in to 12.5 hours... which would have been fine if we were talking about daylight hours, but it was delayed from 1.30am to 3am.
On a side note. We had to check our bike and luggage into the baggage carriage on the train. This involves locating a different office to the ticketing kiosk and being charged what appeared to be an entirely arbitrary amount by a man in a very tight fitting Thailand national railway uniform.
It occurred to me that we had been over billed by tight uniform guy when he proudly showed off a couple of tubes of toothpaste he demanded as a bribe from a shopkeeper who had just had a large package delivered to his loading bay...Mmm.
When, on arrival at our layover, the chap unloading the our luggage, said that we had to pay him 10 Baht for unloading our bags, I began to think that all employees were on the make. I'd read about this scam on the web, so I declined to pay him. He didn't really persist once he realised I wasn't just going to give him money on his say so.
The officer in charge of the baggage at our final stop, presented us with a bill for 70 Baht (well he hand wrote it onto our shipping docket). I think the difference in price was due to the fact that this guy was wearing another tight fitting uniform. Anyhow, again I asked what this was for and told him that we had not had to pay anything previously. He kept repeating that we had to pay him, but refused to say what it was for.
I thought, he's not going to keep this up for long, but a crowd of his minions had appeared and I don't think that he could lose face by backing down, and he still refused to say what we were being charged for. After 5 mins or so of him getting increasingly agitated he finally exploded, “Forget it, I'll pay it myself!”. Which confirmed for me that he was definitely just on the make, otherwise he would have called over the police from the end of the platform... and when did any government employee pay a fine on behalf of someone they were supposed to be collecting money from?
Facing down the forces of Thai railway tyranny and oppression made me feel hungry, but first we had to face the border guards, get our visa's and cycle the 20kms into Vientiane. The border crossing was relatively easy if as little time consuming, 'go to window 2 and get form, then window 1(??) hand in form and pay money, wait 5 mins and then voila one visa' We covered the distance into Vientiane in no time on the flat roads. Checked into the Mali Namphou Guesthouse. Quite nice, with Wifi, Cable TV and hot showers. Have spent 3 nights here as the power supply for the laptop broke yesterday and we didn't want to head out into the sticks without a way to charge it.
Tomorrow, we head off on the 400km to Luang Prabang. Hopefully the weather will cool a bit as we now start climbing to the Laos highlands and there is a big fat cloud across Northern Loas and southern China, fingers crossed!
On another note entirely Loas has yielded a veritable deluge of mini's young and old and the scores stand at Rich 9 and Den 10.
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