Excess and Deficiency

In countries labelled ‘less developed’ and alike, there will be excess and deficiency. When you cross the border the changes strike you straight away

The first thing that struck me in Laos was the excessive number of Toyota Hilux’s, it wasn’t a surprise to learn that they were built in neighbouring Thailand. But to balance out the excessive number of Hilux’s was a severe deficiency in pants for children, registration plates for motorbikes and women drivers. These were hard to spot. Ryan and I started a version of the punch buggy game where if you spotted a kid wearing pants then you got to hit the other person. Unfortunately this ended up with us riding into a town then randomly breaking into violence which is never a good look. We cancelled the game shortly after it started.

In Cambodia, the excess was flat straight boring roads and pajamas. Any time of the day, anywhere, a good proportion of the women were in their flannel pajamas in teddy bear print with Chinglish slogans such as ‘good beer’. I wasn’t prepared to accept that half the countries women never got out of their pajamas, so I went into research mode.

I did my research riding in and around Chi Phat in the Cardamon mountains. Most of the riding I ‘d done in Cambodia was either unrewardingly difficult, or dead boring (that was definitely in excess). The Cardamon mountains, which run along the Southern coast, are a welcome change to the flat and hot centre of Cambodia. Due to the tough terrain there are only a few roads through and their quality and existance are both questionable. Interpret that as ‘open for adventure’.

Chi Phat is an ex logging and poaching town that turned to eco tourism using a commuinity based model and has done a fantastic job of it. The area has waterfalls, jungle and archeological sites and the ex-poachers have retrained as forest guides for trekking, mountain bikeing tours etc. There are plenty of homestays and guesthouses in the village and surrounds. The locals were always chatty and keen to practice some English. I went for one night and stayed for three.

In Chi Phat my pajama research noticed that flannel was not worn first thing in the morning, nighties were the popular choice. Therefore, the ettiquette was to wake up and put your pajamas on. An awesome concept. I also started checking out the markets and found an issue that I never resloved. The markets sold clothes. The type that should be worn outside. Pajamas only made up a small proportion of the stock in the markets, but a large portion of the clothes worn. I can only assume that pajamas are in such demand that they can’t keep them in stock.

In Chi Phat I bumped into Petros, a Greek cyclist that I’d met in passing two days before. Both of us were heading similar directions towards Thailand, although he was staying in Cambodia, and we were keen to leave the town via a jungle trail rather than the highway. By yourself, the concept of heading along an unmarked trail was a bit daunting, but with company it was possible. We knew motorbikes could make it through and it would be two days on push bike with a decent sized town to sleep at in the middle.

After asking 5 people, the 6th person seemed to know the way and gave us some instructions. The first day into the jungle to Thma Bang, the second day coming back out onto the highway and up to Koh Kong. My favourite part of the instructions was ‘Turn right at Thma Toeng.’ to which the obvious question was ‘Whats at Thma Toeng? How do we know when we’re there?’. ‘Oh, there is nothing at Thma Toeng’. ‘Okay, so when we get to the place that looks like everything else, we turn right, got it’.

So we bravely headed off, riding fully loaded touring bikes on what should have been ridden on a mountain bike. The single track deteriorated as the jungle encroached with foilage hitting your handlebars on both sides and the hills got steeper. 3 hours in the middle of the day went to a couple of kilometers of pushing up a hill. The bridges got progressively more minimalist and the adventure got better and better.

Fresh and excited at the start of the day

 

The right hand pole of this bridge also rolled if you weren't careful.

 

Uphills were often pushedHandlebar width was all you got in some places

Doop. Doop doop. Doop doop doop doop doop doop. Intermission

I figured from the start that in 6 months of travelling, I’d lose a few days here and there to various aliments. Until now I’d only lost a few days to doonah days, hardly an ailment, but I recently had stack number 3. It was caused by fatigue and a bit of off camber gravel. It was low speed and hardly more than a scratch for damage.

I didn’t do anything about that scratch. That night Ryan and I slept in out bivvies, which turned into little saunas, we were still covered in dirt from the day. Shortly after that some bites right in my underarm that had already been hanging around for a week started to get infected. Four days later my left wrist was sitting 2 inches off my hip when my arm was hanging loose due to the swelling in my underarm. A couple of days later my body came good and the swelling went away (Note: I skipped the details about oozing puss).

Infection number two followed straight afterwards when the little scratch from my stack decided to get inflamed. Initially I decided that my body could again fight it and win, this morning I started taking antibiotics. The problem is that its my leg thats inflamed and doesn’t go well with riding a bike.

I’m in Battambang. Its a reasonable size city without being big. I was staying in a lovely family run guesthouse for a whopping $3 a night, however with no window, no hot water and no TV it wasn’t a good spot to recuperate. I’m now staying in one of those places where they call you sir and charge $11. However cable TV is awesome for helping you stay immobilised. Today cable TV taught me that Japan has a museum for Ramen noodles, CNN should not classify as a news channel, myth busters are starting to scrape the barrel on the definition of a myth and the Russians have nuclear powered ice breakers.

As I checked out of my lovely guesthouse this morning the girl asked where I was going and I had to tell her the truth that I was swapping hotels. She demanded to see my leg then promptly went off to get ointments to clean it up. She returned with a bottle labelled something gin, it also smells like gin.

She must have been one of those people that loves popping other peoples zits (I am not one of those people). She spent 10 minutes squeezing puss from my leg from all directions, when she was done there were serious divots in her favoutite spots. Knowing how tough they breed their women around here I dared not loose face and tell her how much it hurt. . . except once.

While she was squeezing away she kept up a constant dialogue of broken english. “You do nothing, very problem”. and “You go see doctor Cambodia . . . ” followed by an impersonation of the sound of a circular saw “. . . you no want doctor”. At one stage she wanted to lance it open, she pulled out some old hyperdermic needles but the look of panic in my eye seemed to make her put them away again.

So for now, I’m lazing around in bed improving my education from CNN and Fox news. I’m crossing my fingers that things don’t get worse. I’ve been told that the provincial hospital has two international doctors so I can’t be in too bad hands if it all goes wrong.

And for the record, I braved it last night and made it out to see Dengue Fever play a free outdoor gig. My highlights were having a perfect view of stage by being the tallest in the crowd amongst Cambodians and the guys with the ultimate mosh pit accessories, wearing your motorbike helmet in the crowd. Winner.

 

Pictures – Si Phan Don, Laos, to Battambang, Cambodia.

From Laos into Cambodia. I even wrote Captions with the pics this time!

Should we take this back road instead?

Every culture is different. It took me a while to understand that when a Vietnamese person tells you that a town is 17km down the road, don’t expect it to be 16 or 18km away. It will be 17km. Likewise, it took Ryan and I a while to understand that if asking if Chheb is down this road, the response “yes” has little implication on whether Chheb is down that road or not. We got lost.

There may not have been any signposts and the road matched the description of “dirt but good” that we had been told, but there were some signs that we should have told us we were going the wrong way. Things like people in military uniform with automatic weapons are quite common along international borders, but not 80km from the border. The river that flowed right to left instead of left to right should have raised alarm. There was a signpost for a tourist attraction waterfall that looked similar to the one we’d seen on the Laos side of the Meekong two days earlier. Towards the end of the day we commented that people were still drinking Beer Lao on the Cambodian side of the border. We looked quiet surprised when someone said Sai Bai Dee, the Laos word for Hello, at about 4pm having ridden nearly 70km away from the Meekong and by now over 100km as the crow flies to the nearest point in Laos.

We were expecting Chheb to be 80km from Thala Boravit where we started that days ride. Just after 80km we came to a 4 way intersection that wasn’t marked on any of out three maps, but we’d been told there was a new road that we wanted to take. There was a small cafe / restaurant at the intersection so we stopped in for water and asked directions from a guy that spoke some English.
“How far to Chheb?”
“54 kilo”
“What?!”
“No no. Fif-ten”
“phew, for a moment I thought we were totally lost”

We pulled out our maps, scratched our heads about where this new road must be. Asked about guesthouses in Chheb, which apparently there weren’t. But apparently there was one in this town. We scratched our heads a bit more.
“What is this town called?”
“Sra Lao”
Scratch. scratch. There’s a Sra Lao up there somewhere. Wait.
“Where is Laos?”. Point northish. “Far?” No. “Where is the Meekong?” . . . . Oh.

In short, we had ridden 70km along a dirt road to get to within 12 km of where we had been in Don Det, Laos, two nights earlier. We went into the town, found a guesthouse and drank 3 Beer Laos (aka. Nearly 2 liters) each to make us feel better.

The following day we tried again to get to Chheb. Apparently there was a choice of two dirt roads, the old bad one or the new good one. I’ll take the new good one thanks, which was recommended. Both are the same length.

The new good road was 99% good. However the 1% was the bits the bridge builders hadn’t gotten to yet, so it was either big gullys and water crossing, a bridge made up of some logs, or rough as guts dried mud where the water had come over the road already. By the end of the day there was only one tyre track in the road, no cars at all went on this road. Slow going, hot sun, sweat and dust made for a really tough day (note the 3 beer Lao as carbo loading the night before). The only town we went through was one of those stare-towns where people want to stare at you, but no interest in helping you. We managed to get three people giving conflicting directions and got onto a road out of town that was 95% good (much more dried mud than before).

However, approaching Chheb (signified by the number of mobile phone towers) we came to a t-junction with a perfect condition, wide road with all the drainage and bridges in place. We found out later that this was the road we should have been on 24 hour earlier.

After a feed in Cheeb, we knew we had to push on to get the following days distance down. Ryan and I are both carrying bivvy bags and it does seem a shame if we never use them. We got 4 opinions on which road to take and opted for one where the guy wanted us to pay him for his advice, then headed out of town. Hoping we were on the right road, wondering when we would finally get to this asphalt road and legging it as hard as we could.

At sundown we found a small turn off to a field, set up camp, looked at how small our bivvy bags were and regretted the decision, ate food and tried to work out where we were then gave up. That night it rained, getting us wet inside our bicycle bags and turning the road outside into sticky mud.

On day three of our misadventure, we filled up on a breakfast of sticky rice and sweetened condensed milk (almost as good as in a soft bread roll) and tried to leave. I made it about 200m before my mud guards filled up and I had to take them off, 5km down the road we both got stuck in the stickiest of clay mud. 135km from our destination, things weren’t looking good, but couldn’t get worse. Thankfully they improved and the road turned from mud to gravel to bad asphalt and finally into good asphalt with milestones and everything.

Ryan and I both made purchasing errors through mis-communication that morning. Ryan tried to buy 3 litres of water but came back with 6 which wasn’t such a bad thing. My error was when I spotted the stall opposite a primary school selling dough balls rolled in sugar, normally 10 of them would cost around 2500 riel. They make pretty good riding food so I tried to buy 20 and gave her 5000 riel but then she filled up two bags with 20 in each, clearing out nearly all of her stock. As I rode out of town I had the mental image of school kids running across the road at recess to find that today there were no fried dough balls because some foreigner took them all. The tears in their eyes are still with me.

The three days were 80km of dirt to Sra Lao, 100km of dirt to south of Chheb somewhere then 140km to Kompong Thom of which the first 20 or so were dirt. We were knackered and caught a bus from Kompong Thom to Siem Riep, it was 160km of flat boring straight road anyway.

Sticking to the signposted roads from now on.

Two things every backpacker must do

There are some things that you don’t want to go home having not done. In Laos the number one activity is Tubing in Vang Vien. Don’t go home without the singlet. Generically, worldwide, the second activity is loosing your camera. I would like a bonus point for achieving both on the same day.

I’d heard about the tubing in Vang Vien from several people who had made it back from Laos, once in Laos it came up regularly in conversation and you learnt to judge how trashy a backpacker was by how many days they went tubing, and how much they loved it. The pretense is you hire an old truck inner tube and jump in a tuk tuk. They drop you in a bar 3.5km upstream and you drink your way back downstream floating between bars. The bars are all competing for supremacy which they do by having the most fun toy (rope swing, static surfboard thing, highboard to jump from or water slide) and providing the most free local whiskey which they tip straight down your throat as you climb out of the water. The combination of waterslides, fast flowing water and booze has safely delivered all but 16 people this year to the final destination.

You can love it or hate it and it seemed much easier to love than hate, so I took that option. It was haloween so there were people in dress ups, we were helping a friend we’d made along the way celebrate her birthday and there was sunshine, bikinis, rope swings and beer. How could you not love it. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that this party that we were loving was the same as yesterdays party and the same as tomorrows. 365 days a year there were people who worked in this reality defying little slice of river and it can’t be good for your mental state. As for backpackers that get lost in the town for weeks on end, I worry.

Towards the end of the day we realised that we had a lot of river to go still and not much daylight left. Time to float the rest of the way back to town. My waterproof camera was safely in my pocket with the velcro closed. I took some photos along the way, each time my camera went back in the pocket with the velcro safely closed. Then I looked down and my pocket was open and my camera gone. The last back up I’d done was nearly a month before. We were floating in fast-moving muddy water. There was nothing I could do, no body to get angry with, nobody to blame. Some things just happen. End of story. I bought a new camera in the next town.

So my claim to fame is that in one day I completed Laos prime tourist attraction and became yet another traveler to lose a camera.

Falang! Falang!

South Americans use the term Gringo. Here it’s Falang. The first pantsless kid (kids never wear pants) to spot you announces your arrival with ‘Falang! Falang’. Lonely planet describes the restaurants by the river as ‘Falang style’ and whenever anybody talks about us in Lao, the word pops up. I was asked how hot I wanted papaya salad the other day and replied ‘Falang hot’, she understood.
Last night we had a cultural experience and found out Falang means ‘French’ not foreigner. Now we have a chicken and the egg question to unravel about the French and Foreigners in Laos.
Last night Ryan and I fell into the boys and egos trap, for the second time. We had planned a slightly shorter day and thought it would be nice to knock off another 20km towards Luang Prabang to make the next day shorter. We got some reliable advice that there was a guesthouse in . . . 20 km down the road. But that town was only 10km down the road, so there must be another guesthouse at the 20km mark, right?
Just at the tail end of dusk and 30 something km down the road, Ryan stopped in a village and asked if there was somewhere we could sleep. When I arrived he looked confused but said people had run in ten directions and thought they were organizing something. We then got the follow me from an old guy who spoke zero English but was pretty sharp at charades.
His house consisted of Himself and the grandma, a grand kid and wife and two other miscellaneous late teen children. More people seemed to appear and disappear every time you looked around. The father popped in at some point but apparently lived elsewhere.
With English words being sparse, The saviours of the night were the lonely planet phrase book and Point It, the picture book for travelers that has pictures of everything you may or may not want (For instance, It has pictures of a pig and a dog, so you can clarify). The books were brilliant and got us though small talk and dinner.
The phrase book let us down with the Laos to English translation of ‘Would you like to leave?’ which left Ryan and I feeling a touch unwelcome, but apparently should have been ‘Would you like to come and get beer?’. We then got beer but through an accident of communcications got twice the desired number and proceeded to get our hosts tipsy and disapproving looks from his wife.
Point It was 99% great and turned into the basis of an English lesson for an 11 year old that had morphed into the room at some point, who seemed to be the star English student in the village. In return Ryan and I got to practice counting to 20.
Where Point It came up 1% short was in culturally appropriate photos. It’s useful to know if a place has a shower, therefore it’s a good picture to have, but the liberal minded French/German/Falang makers of the book could have selected a better picture of a woman in the shower. The book has now been opened so many times to that page that it naturally falls open to it. I think there may have been a shower down the street because the boys would look at the photo and point that way.
After good food and lots of laughs we bedded down for a good nights sleep, terminated pre-dawn sometime by every rooster and person in Laos waking up. We were serenaded to sleep and awoken by grandad watching music videos, I’m not sure if he liked the music of the ladies. We were smiling as we hit the road. It was a fun way to spend a night.

An intermission in the lonely road.

I spent nearly all of my time in Vietnam alone. I met a handful of other cyclists and outside of the major tourist centres a handful of english speakers. Then I came to Laos.

In Vietnam my communications in English were largely facebook and email. Tom would occasionally send family photos to my kindle, when they appeared it was like opening a present because you weren’t quite sure what it would be.

Since Luang Prabang I have had Ryans company and we’ve rarely been alone at dinner, largely from the company of other cyclists.

We’ve come to the conclusion that cyclists have some cool tales of adventures behind them. Here’s a quick summary:

Phonsaven I met Wim and Tine from Belguim (http://movingaround.be/) who had just met up with Alia from Netherlands (I think) and were going the opposite direction from me. Wim has ridden Canada to Argentina on a previous trip.

Luang Prabang I met 8 Thai guys out touring, followed by 3 guys that worked in Hong Kong, two of them were riding for a week, but Thomas was on a long adventure back home. I may cross paths with him again after ryan leaves.

We also met Jix and Amande from France who are making a documentary on education systems in remote areas. Check out their stuff at http://www.juste-un-tour-en-velo.com/. We did a day trip and shared a couple of dinners and several beers with them. We also met a German guy called Ben, the previous day Ben had decided that late in the afternoon he would prefer to ride the remaining 70km to LP rather than stay where he was. He arrived a few hours after dark having covered 200km in one day.

Leaving LP by Boat to Pak Beng, we met Brian, the maker of Hobo Maps, maps designed by a cyclist for cyclists, with references to landmarks etc. http://hobomaps.com/. We told him we’d report on the little travelled road from Pak Beng to Huay Xai (ryanon2wheels.wordpress.com the short answer is don’t ride it.)

From Huay Xai we spent 3 days at the Gibbon Experience, an eco-tourism outfit that is supporting a conservation project for Gibbons. It mixes up the highlights between attempting to spot gibbons shaking the trees as they swing and zip-lining across valleys on wires way way abve the jungle canopy. No cyclists, but people.

This morning we had a rolling breakfast in Viong Phukka with two Dutch cyclists heading towards Huay Xai, as soon as they left we were joined by Thomas, also from Holland, who was heading our way and we leapfrogged with all day.

Phew. Thats a lot of cyclists!

Next time I might even write about what we’ve been doing.

James