On into Lao, and the start on the long slog north again

Written on the 2nd of December 2018,  from Pakkading, that is, the town at the mouth (Pak) of the Kading river, which has basically turned into a short length of tail waters below the new Chinese dam just upstream a ways.  I will probably never see the dam, it's not visible from the highway, so you won't get a photo from me. I spoke to some of the engineers a couple of years back and they anticipated a dam face over 300 feet tall if I understood correctly.  A big, or at least very tall dam.  I have no right to an opinion, but have one anyway, and that is that Lao rivers are getting dammed up at a terrible rate.  I don't know the Kading at all above the district Hospital, where you first get a glimpse of it.  It may be a perfectly logical place for a dam and will do no end of good.  We have ours too.  But the others, like the Ou, with its chain of six new dams (without locks) blocking navigation forever (or at least a very long time) and turning a wild and beautiful river into a chain of muddy pools. . .that's another story altogether, and there are innumerable other streams, large and small (including even the Mekong), all told, it's a huge volume of dam building going on right now,  in Lao and northern Viet Nam. . .and if I understand correctly, the power is largely intended to be shipped to China.  Dear me.  I do hope someone understands what they're doing and has it well thought out.  I will never see.
But that doesn't really detract from the wonder of being on the road.

We left Lao Bao yesterday after a painless and quick transit through both Vietnamese and Lao border controls.  The total cost this year was $35 for the Lao visa and $2 because I forgot to bring a photo.  I've given them the same ones since 2005 but I've no idea where I put the last of them.  Dear me.  Well, I won't need them again and for $2.. . .what can you say?  I didn't time it, but I think it was less than an hour, start to finish.

The ride down to Savannakhet was lovely. . .well, not so much lovely as warm and dry and with a good riding surface.  The road is immaculate, spotless, almost perfectly straight (well, no, that's not much fun, but it sure makes for quick passages) it's brand new for the most part, with only three small rough patches where they are. . .building two new bridges out on the highway and a new traffic circle in Seno.  Good grief.  You can't, after all, have all new, beautiful roads without building them eh??  The sky was blue, the temperatures started cool up in the mountains, but became lovely warm and then toasty in the afternoon.  The bike never skipped a beat, purred for miles and miles, while little flocks of white clouds gradually filled up perhaps half the sky. . .it was marvelous.  It's about 230 km from Lao Bao to Savan, and we average about 45 or 50 kmh I think.  We did it in a bit under 5 hours, including a very nice Vietnamese lunch (alongside the road in Laos).  The obviously Lao lady even offered it to me in Vietnamese. . .Pho Bo. . .and quoted the price (about $1.50) in Vietnamese (but Lao currency!).  It made for an easy start, since I have essentially no Lao beyond "Please, Thank You and Hi There"!

It's truly dry season here, the watercourses are all very low, some are no more than occasional ponds in the stream beds.

All the rice has been harvested all along this part of the country, though I haven't seen any scorched fields yet.

This is not typical. . .but it sure made for good traveling.  The road is string straight for long stretches and gloriously smooth.  Not the mountains though, that comes later

Pardon the wires, electricity and data need to travel too.  Note the little low dam, probably for irrigation or domestic water locally.  I don't have any objections. . .

That must be a wet hole, laundry away from the river itself.  H'mm.

One of many sorts of Lao house. . .red brick tile, a downstairs that is closely bricked up now, but was likely built on open "stilts" of concrete originally.  The living goes on upstairs a lot of the time, with the downstairs for machinery or livestock (but also weaving looms and living room furniture!)

In Savannakhet, late in the day

Is this French architecture?  a grand old structure in any event.

Tuks are a delight, and none of them seem to have two-stroke motors any more, so their exhaust is a lot nicer.

A bit of Leena's "Guest House". . .really, a substantial hotel in five buildings.  Lao land, especially in the center of the block, as this is, is much more available than in Viet Nam.  Less crowding.  The bike didn't get to go indoors, but there wasn't even any dew, let alone a downpoiur.

Lao altars in the house are different from Vietnamese, but just as important.

Looking down from my balcony toward the air conditioned wing!  It was fine sleeping with just a fan on the ceiling, and saved enough to buy dinner.

We picked a new guest house at random in Savan, Leena's, off the main roads, but well signposted with red, yellow and blue signs that light up at night.  It's a very nice place, and very reasonably priced, and at least as importantly, the family, right down to the chihuahua with her little girl's doll dress and the two year old young son. . .all of them were pleasant and helpful, with very little English, smiles and thoughtfulness did the job.  There were chores of course, most notably changing $200 USD into something like $1,735,000 Lao kip.  $8700 something kip to the dollar.  That takes a little getting used to, but I'll get it right before we leave the country. . .I hope.  I tried the two local suggestions from the hotel, but neither wanted to deal with that much money on a Sunday morning, so I rode across town to the Malay Gold Shop and sold my $200 there. . .as I have every trip since. . .er, quite a while ago. The lady in charge is stern and severe, but the people on the counters (over the fortune in pure gold jewelry) are delightful.

That's all solid gold, owned I think as much for financial purposes as for its beauty, but if you're going to have the stuff you might as well dress up your lady!

I really like Savan, have written long letters and parts of a book sitting in the shade on the street above the Mekong, eating this and that and drinking Beerlao. .. .I've poked into a number of the local monasteries and documented their racing canoes (the sort of thing fifty or a hundred young novices and monks paddle fiercely in competitions all along the river), the hotels have been lovely,  the people are friendly, the coffee shop on the sidewalk near the river (where the lady behind the fire speaks Vietnamese for me) is always full of people who want to know where i'm from (always somebody speaks English. . .I still have no Lao), of course the food is wonderful and so on and so forth.  But I've delayed too much this year and the romp through the North of Laos and Viet Nam is truly a tenuous thing, fraught with possibly catastrophic delays, so. . ..I scooted around town, did the necessary chores, touched my finger tips lightly on my favorite places, ate my favorite breakfast, dawdled over coffee with an engineer and a professor of livestock breeding, (supper the night before was an experiment, the verdict on which is still out), paid my bills, filled up the bike and managed to be out of town by. . .uh. . .h'mm.  Well, before 10:00 anyway.

And after a very rocky start (some of them are like that) it went well enough.  I finally had a sunny day (oh yes, way over 90 according to the telephone) and an interesting exit from the city, so I mounted the phone in her new handlebar bracket and hooked her up to the new handlebar usb port (am I for real??) and let her drive me straight onto the bridge to  Thailand.  Yikes.  I'd been suspicious for a mile or two, but it's all new construction, so I thought perhaps she knew what she was doing, but when she lined me up straight into the queue for the Lao departure immigration checkpoint. . .I pulled the plug on her.  Someone needs to speak with the writers of the app I fear! That would have been a costly and embarrassing delay in just another km or so. Thailand doesn't want me and my Vietnamese-Chinese bike!! So I back tracked and picked up my old route out of town, which used to be pretty nice. . .sort of narrow and slow, through lots of neighborhoods, on the dike top mostly.

It's really rough now, and actually, once we finally joined it, so is a lot of Hwy 13, which will be our road for the next few days.  It's one of my least favorite road conditions. . .flawless pavement interspersed with huge chuck holes, either fresh (empty, with sharp pavement edges to crash into) or filled with temporary repairs. . .huge chunks of rock often, bound up with clay. . .or just the clay, which sets hard as a rock this time of year with the heat and the dry weather.  You get a nice stretch of road, let out the reins and kick the horse in the ribs and things move well for a bit, then you see an anomaly ahead.  Perhaps another truck or bike kicks up a cloud of dust (dust?  on pavement? what can this mean??) or you just spot the white or red clay for yourself and throw on the brakes while desperately trying to spot "the way" through. . .if there is one. . .and line up for it if there is.  It's really hard on nerves, greatly slows progress, and a mistake can bend a wheel (usually the front) badly enough to stop you entirely.  We did well enough today, but it was a lot of work.

Inside a roadside restaurant.  The old lady with the pink scarf was shy, but not the young lady with the odd lace-up pants.  She spent twenty minutes, my  whole bowl of soup, putting on infinitely detailed makeup and brushing out her wet hair.  At one point she made a funny eye-blink face at her mom and sister (skewering pork slices just across the table from me).  Then they all realized I'd seen it and the whole place broke up laughing.  I ordered a bowl of noodles by pointing at it, but then they brought me ice water, the basket of herbs and lettuce, a package of tissues, a full array of silverware and chopsticks, offered me beer and (?) rice wine. .. .and showed me the bill (as usual here) by typing the amount  into a little calculator and showing it to me, carefully counting the zeros.  The meal was $18,000 Lao kip, say $2.50.  Dandy.

The kitchen.

The rest of the clientele.  Red shirt is named Lee (choose your own spelling) and she's fourteen and knows a good bit of English. How cool is that??

I take this photo every trip, you can't help it. . .it's the first lump of mountain on the long northward road from southern Laos.

just a house. . .

Er. . .from a different angle?

One of thousands of small local temples.. . .monasteries really.  This one has some new construction in mind I'd say, the pile of sand for plaster or mortar is a good indicator.

This is new.  To us anyway.  I'd never managed to pick up a bit of the lake at the foot of the rock.

Nowadays the gas stations are increasingly everywhere and I didn't see very much fuel for sale from barrel pumps at all.  Perhaps up in the North we'll see that again.  

We were in to Pakkading and checked into my favorite (of three) guest houses at least half an hour before sunset, so I offloaded the horse and put her in the hallway upstairs and went out to look over the town as the light faded.  That sort of low angle lighting can produce really lovely photographs, but it will also tempt you beyond the technical limits of your camera.  We had a good half hour but of course there were some discards too!  This isn't the nicest guest house in town, but it's more than adequate, and it's an easy walk all over.  You might prefer the fancier place just out of town!

Sunset at the mouth of the River Kading. . .where it flows into the Mekong.  This is the town's little harbor, with the river boats nosed into the bank all along. . .a natural cove I think, I've seen its mouth dry enough the boatmen have to get out and walk their canoes over the entrance bar.  Many of the boats are steel now, but a few are still wood.  All use long tail outboards.

Long and skinny, but substantial boats anyway, I'm not sure if they do more fishing or if the presence of Thailand across the river makes for more interesting business!

Pet roosters are popular all over Viet Nam and Lao.  They fight, but usually with padding over their spurs (unlike Mexican chickens, all of whom end up cut up at the end of a fight).  But they are washed and groomed and shown off among friends as well.  You've heard of a wet hen??  This is a very damp rooster.  The basketry is his daytime house, set down usually on a patch of grass for entertainment.

It was a really pretty butterfly but wouldn't hold still and the light was fading fast.  

Fairly typical Pakkading house. . .they are doing well here.

Just a street in Pakkading.

Off the highway, not selling to the traveling trade, just local things for household and garden.

A small shade structure near the street is part of many homes here, a place to sit and visit as your neighbors walk by.

Side cars are a very popular add on to motorbikes here.  The attachments are solid steel, so very little articulation between the bike and the sidecar, just flex.  This is the most normal sort, a cargo platform and a seat over the fender.  She's three, he's two.  She's shy, but he's not even looking.  Dad has excellent English!  What fun!

Waiting for a bus. . .one of the main industries of the town (other than the boats on the river) is supplying meals in a hurry to pausing buses.  The buses are mainly coming southbound from the capital Vientiane, about 175 km up the road.  The fish and fowl and bits of pork have all been pre-cooked on charcoal and are waiting, along with steamers full of sticky rice.  .you can get supper, complete with cookies, soda pop and beer very very quickly.

This isn't all of them. . .they can handle multiple buses at any time!