Louang Probang is a fantastic town and we were reluctant to leave the colonial backwater which is tourist central in Northern Laos. But after 4 days we could stay no more. We knew that we had been a wee bit preoccupied with the Tibet bike flight saga (wont bore you but bikes on planes in Asia don't seem to go!) and our broken spoke (drama, I never knew a broken spoke could cause such alarm in a young man!!) so we had not been doing the usual tourist trail of Wat's, Pagodas and such like so on day 4 we headed out to some waterfalls which I had not seen on my last trip here, but really wanted to see. Enter 1 tuk tuk driver who had obviously read the SEA tuk tuk driver manual of how to rip off the Farang. Unfortunately he did not read the last rule which was don't try and rip off stubborn Denyze, as the heels go in and the smiles come out and budging from the agreed price does not happen. However, I think we all may have got our just deserts as on the boat ride (cause of problems) back from the waterfall we all got caught in an horrendous rain storm and got soaked to the skin. Karma, some would say.
We set off from LP at dawn, as we were pedaling down the street we saw the local monks out collecting Alms. This is a beautiful sight all the orange swathed men and boys walking single file past the shop keepers collecting a small something from each. There were plenty of tourists out for the photo opportunity but unfortunately I found out the hard way once that when you take a camera out of an air conditioned room it is best to leave it in the bag until it has warmed up, otherwise your lens takes pics from the inside of a fog bank!! so no photos, which is a shame.
Our days ride saw us follow one river after another which was great as there were hills along the way but no real climbing like on previous days. However our nemesis the sun popped out and chased us in to a handy restaurant for 4 hours, complete with bonkers cats who kept attacking me. All in all the 72 mile ride took 7 hours but we did not hit Pak Mong the only town with guesthouses until nightfall. We would recommend anyone who is passing through here to stay at the guesthouse by the bus station as it was the best of a bad bunch!
We had done our research and knew that the next day was a real shiner!! we decided to hit the road early and I mean early! 4am early. It was pitch black outside yet still there were locals starting their day. We completed 9 miles before day break with at least 6 of those going slowly up hill. We hit several landslides that were in the throws of being cleared up and at one point had to walk the bike through as it was just to sticky. The road from here on in was in pretty poor repair. you can see that top layer is so thin that as soon as it starts to erode it breaks up pretty quick and turns into a downhill mountain bike course complete with giant pot holes and massive drop offs, we had to walk the bike down one as we though the back wheel might buckle as we are now both paranoid about the back wheel and the dodgy spoke repair!! There was one huge climb today of about 15 miles which reached a height of 1200 meters lucky for us this was the first climb and was completed in the relative cool of the early morning.
We were not so lucky on the second and after riding a ridge for awhile and loosing some height we hit the last climb with the sun on our backs. Yep you guessed it we walked, hopping from shade to shade. We arrived in Oudomxay by 2pm and could not believe that 50 miles had taken us 10 hours!!
We are two days from the Chinese border and are not sure what the state of affairs will be with regards to accessing blogger as it is a google thing. So you may or may not see a post up here of our china exploits, but we will try and find a willing volunteer in the UK to up load blog posts for us!!
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