Riding from Da Nang to Hoi An

I woke up early in the morning in Da Nang, and packed my stuff to take off.  I went downstairs, turned in my key, and packed up my bike.  Then I took off to eat breakfast and have coffee at a little restaurant I had eaten at the day before.  After that, I headed south out of town.  On the map, it looked like I was taking the road that ran along the ocean.  But I didn't see the ocean at all, it was blocked all the way down by a line of buildings, or the road ran inland farther.  On the way down, a woman pulled aside me on her motorbike and engaged me in conversation while we were both riding down the road.  It seemed like she wanted to practice her English some, so we bantered back and forth for a while as we continued down the road.  She wanted to show me a mountain that she said she lived near, but I wanted to keep going to Hoi An, so I thanked her and kept going on my way, while she turned off the road to go wherever she was going.  Actually, the mountain looked pretty cool, maybe I should have checked it out, but I had a plan, I guess.

I arrived in Hoi An about eleven in the morning, and started looking for a place to stay.  I headed for the Old City to see if I could find a place to stay that was close to the center of the action, so I wouldn't have to ride my bike, and could just step out and walk around.  But I tried a few guesthouses and hotels, and they were full.  Then I tried Booking.com, but couldn't find anything in the area there either, except for a couple of hostels, but I wanted to try to get a private room.  A hostel would have worked if I couldn't find anything, but I finally found and booked a couple of nights at a homestay online that was several kilometers away from the center of the city.  That would work; I could just find a place to park my bike near the center and then wander from there.  And it would be a peaceful place to stay where I could get away from the hubbub when I needed to.

I showed up at the place, it was called Portulaca Homestay.  There was no sign at all signifying it as a place for people to stay; it just looked like a big private residence.  I wandered in, and there was nobody around on the ground floor at all, so I just sat down and waited for a while.  After a few minutes, a friendly Vietnamese guy came from downstairs and said he had just seen my booking online.  He spoke English really well so we did not have any communication difficulties.  He told me, though, that check-in time was not until two in the afternoon, and that the room would not be ready until at least one.  I told him that was fine, I would just leave my bags there and return when it was check-in time.  He sat down with me for a bit and showed me some sights in the area that I marked on Google Maps so I could check out some of them later.  Then I headed off to the Old City to wander around for a while.

The Old City kind of reminded me of a Vietnamese version of Santa Fe, New Mexico.  The buildings were all very short and stylized, and almost all of them had a storefront on the bottom floor and then one more story that looked like a residence, or a more subdued business.  For some reason, there were a lot of optical stores that offered eye exams and glasses.  I was curious about what it would cost, since I hadn't had a new glasses prescription in quite a while, and probably need one.  A guy in one shop quoted me a figure of about $135 in US dollars for multi-focal glasses in designer (or faux-designer fake) frames.  Not too bad, cheaper than most storefronts in the US, but probably a little more expensive than it would be for me to buy glasses online from the US.  So I decided to pass for now.

Then I went by the clothing market, because I wanted to buy some cargo pants or shorts.  I need pants with lots of pockets, and hopefully fairly secure pockets.  But most of the stores there made stuff custom, and it was tailored, rather than off-the-shelf as I'm used to buying.  A woman in one of the shops called me over, “Mistah,” she said, “Come visit my store.  I no have good luck today, maybe you buy something.”  OK, sure, I'll check it out.

She offered to make some pants for me, and told me she could put pockets and zippers wherever I wanted, and she'd give me a discount if I bought two pairs.  She quoted me sixty pounds for two pair; I said that was a little expensive, so we went back and forth until we settled on forty-five dollars for two pair.  That was about what I would pay back home, maybe, at a discount store, but she did all my measurements and would do it custom fitted.  I asked her if she could make them into convertible shorts, and she said sure.  So I paid her the money, and she gave me a receipt and told me to come back tomorrow to pick them up.  It seems a little bit strange to have cargo pants custom tailored, but I guess that is the way things are done here.

After paying for the pants, I headed back to the homestay to check in and take a shower, as I felt pretty grungy from riding in the heat from Da Nang to Hoi An.  I checked in and my room was pretty nice.  I took a shower and also washed the shirt and underwear I was wearing in the bathroom sink.  I then lay down on the bed for a bit to relax.  When I went back out, I put on the wet shirt, and figured it would dry out riding around in the heat on my bike, which it did.

I went back to the Old City of Hoi An after eating dinner, and parked my motorbike in one of the many parking lots for motorbikes in the area.  Then I wandered around for a while, and a woman on a boat beckoned me over to take a boat ride on the river.  She asked for 150,000 dong, but I thought that was a little high, so I told her maybe I would come back later.  She then offered 100,000 dong, and I figured, sure, might as well.  I paid her the money and got on the boat.  It was a pretty enjoyable boat ride, and it was just starting to get dark on a night with a full moon.  But about halfway through the ride, I started thinking that the ride would sure be nicer if I had someone to share it with.  Especially since most of the other boats had couples on them.  Oh, well, such is the life of the solo traveler.  You get to do what you want whenever you want, but the tradeoff is that you usually do it by yourself, unless you meet a person or group of people who want to do stuff with you.

After returning from the boat ride, it had gotten completely dark, and I wandered up and down the area of the river.  There were more and more people arriving, and after a while it was starting to get to the point where many areas I was passing through were just major pedestrian traffic jams. It was cool being down by the river, but it didn't look like the flow of humanity was going to abate anytime soon, so I decided to go get my motorbike and skedaddle out of that area.  Little did I realize that I didn't just put my motorbike in a normal parking lot; it was one where they just jammed bikes in there wherever they would fit, without regard for whether there were any channels out of the lot or not.  So when I got there, I found that my bike was way in the back of a sea of motorbikes, and it was crammed in there about fifteen levels deep.  Great.  Getting out of here was not going to be easy. I tried to show the ticket they had given me to one of the lot attendants, but it looked like he had bigger fish to fry and was not interested in paying attention to me.  For one thing, hordes of bikers were lined up outside the gate of the lot in a huge mass trying to get in, and they were trying to cram bikes in closer to each other to make room for all the people waiting.  I managed to somehow squeeze past the crammed-in bikes to get to where my bike was, but there was absolutely no way to get out of that sea of bikes.  I did, with some effort, and just inching it back and forth and nudging other bikes over a bit, manage to get my bike turned around, so now it was facing outward instead of inward.  But there was no way I was going to get it out past all the other bikes.  I just started inching bikes over a bit, centimeter by centimeter.  Then one of the parking attendants started doing that too from the outer side of the bike blob.  After about a half hour of this, with me and the parking attendant working toward each other, we finally met, and I was able to pass my bike through a narrow channel barely big enough to squeeze through.  But the ordeal was just beginning.  I had to force my way past all of the motorbikes trying to get into the lot, and then once I crept my way into the street, there was a total gridlock traffic jam there.  It took about another fifteen minutes to get through the two blocks outside the parking lot, and then about another fifteen minutes to get through the next six blocks or so.  Then, for a few blocks, there was steady but slow movement, and finally I broke free into relatively unencumbered movement to be able to make my way back to the homestay where I was staying.  Fuck.  I definitely was not going to try to head back toward the Old City any more for the night.  I figured I would just head back to the homestay and call it a night, even though it was only about nine at night.

When I got back to the homestay, I found some leftover Mekong River weed (no, not marijuana, but an edible weed that grows in the river that they dry out into sheets) that I had bought in Laos, and started munching on it.  I love that stuff.  It's sort of like sheets of nori, only it has more of a cotton-y texture, and it is dried along with tomatoes, sesame seeds, and other spices, so it has this rich, complex, spicy taste that squeezes out of it when you chew it.  Not much of it left, have to savor it while I can.

To Hue On The Train

I packed my stuff up from my hostel in Ho Chi Minh City, and asked Jessie at the hostel to call a cab for me.  She said she would call a Grab car, and that it would arrive at 11:30 in the morning.  I sat around and waited for a while, and before I knew it, it was 11:40 in the morning, and no car had arrived.  So I asked Jessie again when the cab was coming, and she got a flustered look on her face; she told me that she got busy and forgot to call.  So she tried Uber, and a car showed up within a couple of minutes.  It was no big deal; I had plenty of time.  I always try to get to a transportation hub earlier than necessary just in case some glitch happens.  I got in the car and headed for the train station.

I arrived at the train station, found out what track my train was on, and it was already there, and it opened to board about ten minutes before I got there.  I went to the compartment, and found that I had an upper bunk.  Bummer.  But definitely survivable.  There was still at least a half hour before the train took off, so I went and got some snacks and beverages.  Shortly after I returned to the compartment, the other upper berth passenger showed up, and he was from Italy.  I figured that the people assigned to the bottom would let us sit there until it was time to sleep or until they wanted to take a nap, and told the Italian guy that usually the bottom bunk passengers let you hang out on the bottom for a while.  But when the two passengers who had the bottom bunks showed up, they were an elderly Vietnamese couple, and seemed quite disconcerted that we were sitting on their bunks.  Oh, well, obviously they were not going to share their bunks with us, as others had on other trains I had been on.  So we moved to the top bunks, and I resigned myself to laying in that cramped space for the whole voyage.

Then the Italian guy had a great idea.  He said he was going to find one of the cars that just had seats, and sit in an empty seat by the window, and if somebody came along and asked him to move, he'd move.  Or he could go to the restaurant car.  So he took off for parts unknown.  Shortly after that, I decided to attempt the same move.  I went to the car right behind the one I was in, and it had a bunck of wooden seats, and was almost empty.  So I just sat by the window for a while, and I was able to snap some pictures too.

After a while, I decided to try to find the restaurant car.  So I went traipsing towards the front of the train, and in the process, got questioned by several of the car attendants as to what I was doing in their car.  I told each of them I was looking for the restaurant car, and then they let me pass without further questioning.  When I got to the restaurant car, I found my Italian suitemate sitting there talking to a Vietnamese kid who spoke English very well, but it was obvious it was just “school English” rather than English learned from conversations with people, which he confirmed.  I sat down to hang out with them, and he told me he was in the eighth grade, and that he hardly ever had a chance to talk to English speakers.  He was obviously a very smart kid; he picked up on a lot of things and liked to talk about subjects like the kinetic energy of the train.  One peculiarity was that he spoke EXTREMELY loudly.  But he was a good companion to talk to, and could converse fluidly on a variety of subject, even though his English was a little bit unusually stilted.  The kid was only going a short distance, so he got off the train about a half hour after I met up with the two of them; we wished him well.

I went back to the compartment shortly after that to lie down for a bit; I didn't really want to sleep, but just to rest my mind.  The Vietnamese couple was fast asleep on their bunks.  Maybe they were too tired to share, and just wanted to sleep without disturbances.  But it turned out they were going a shorter distance than the Italian guy and I were (we were both going to Hue), because in the morning, when I woke up, there were two kids who had taken their place somewhere along the line.  I went to sleep around one in the morning on the train; the Italian guy went to slep much earlier in the evening and woke up before me.  I went to the restaurant car to eat breakfast, and he was there again, so I joined him for breakfast.  When I woke up, we had just passed Hoi An, so there was only about two hundred kilometers to go to Hue.

Danang was the next major stop before Hue, and in Danang, the kids got off, and were replaced by a backpacking couple.  The guy was from Denmark, and his girlfriend was from Australia.  They had both been living in Australia for a while, and then took off to travel.  They were very social, and we had some good conversation in the short time that they were on the train from Danang to Hue.  It was a little bit drawn out, because we had two stops where we stopped for a very long time, so even though it was not that long a distance, it was a little longer than we thought it would be.  The whole trip from Saigon to Hue ended up being about twenty-three hours in total, but it probably saved me a week of travel from Saigon, and also may have saved me from backtracking (though I could have taken a different route the other way, it was still fun to have the experience of taking the train).

When I got to Hue, I had to bid the three of them good-bye, because I had to figure out where to pick up my motorbike, which I had shipped from Saigon a couple of days before I left.  So the three of them took off into the city together, while I wandered around the train station trying to figure out where the shipped motorbikes were.  I wasn't having much luck, so I asked a station officer, “Xe may di Saigon” (which is a poorly constructed sentence in Vietnamese that means “Motorbike goes Saigon”) and she pointed me to a dock at the very end of the station.  But she seemed impressed that I was speaking (or attempting to speak) Vietnamese, and smiled broadly.

I went to the dock, and immediately saw my bike surrounded by a makeshift crate there, and packed in cardboard.  Unfortunately, the helmet was on the rack, and had been wrapped to the rack with sticky tape (I was hoping they would use cord, but if they used tape, that they would wrap it in paper first, but no such luck), so there are now sticky, broad tape marks all over my helmet.  Oh well, I'll live.  There were a bunch of Vietnamese guys sitting on the dock drinking liquor and they tried to get me to drink with them, but I kept begging off.  I've been staying away from the booze lately, and trying to keep that going.  They were very persistent, but I kept saying, “Khong, cam on” (“No, thanks”), until they finally quit trying to get me to drink with them.  They started taking the crate and the packing apart, and screwing the mirrors back on.  While they were doing that, a couple of South African guys came along and were curious about the process because they wanted to ship their motorbikes, and so they asked me a bunch of questions about the procedure.  One of the Vietnamese guys asked where they were from, and they told them they were from South Africa, but the guy looked puzzled, so I told him, “Nam Phi”, which means “South Africa”.

As an aside, my Vietnamese is getting much better.  Its still not to the point where I can have a detailed conversation, but I've been finding that I can have entire simple interactions with people completely in Vietnamese, with multiple back-and-forths, and then understanding what they say back to me, which is really cool to me.

The South Africans stuck around to drink a bit with the Vietnamese guys, who had their hooch in a plastic water bottle.  I had to take off to find gasoline, because they had drained my tank in Saigon.  So I went outside the station to see if I could spot any gas stations, but none seemed to be in sight.  I was getting ready to check Google Maps to find a gas station nearby, when I heard a woman in a conical hat say, “Gas?” to me, and hold up a plastic water bottle filled with liquid.  Apparently there are a bunch of people who hang out outside the train station with water bottles filled with gas for those who shipped their motorbikes.  But they charge a lot more than the gas stations.  It was about 30,000 dong for a small size water bottle, so I bought two.  Strangely enough, the gas was a green liquid, and didn't look like any gas I had ever seen before.  But I poured it into my bike's tank, and it started up.  Yippee!

Then I had to drive my bike down this really steep ramp off the dock, and there was a concrete and iron fence just a few feet past where the ramp ended.  My bike was totally packed with my gear, which made it heavier and more unmanageable, and I didn't want to unpack my bike and pack it again at the bottom of the ramp, so I just gung-ho'd it, even though I thought I might crash into the fence, but it turned out OK.  So I set off to find a hotel in Hue.

I rode around for a while, and didn't see many places, and I thought the hotels I saw might be a little expensive-looking (you can really never tell here...some places that look high-class are amazingly cheap), so I thought I'd try Booking.com, even though I'd had some problems finding places that I had booked with them in the past.  Sure enough, I had a hard time finding the place I booked.  It was not where the map said it was, and I drove up and down the street where it was supposed to be over and over again without success.  I was groaning in frustration, and stopped several times to ask local businesses if they knew where my hotel was.  It turned out it was in this barely visible alley off the street shown on the map, but about a block away from where the map said it was.  I was relieved to find the place, and parked my bike where they told me to put it, a little ways down the alley, and unloaded my stuff.  I was a little concerned because this is the most open and unguarded my bike has been, but it is still there, hopefully it will stay there for my entire stay here.  The hotel is pretty nice, and only about ten bucks a night for a private room, though the wi-fi is spotty and mostly not working.

So I did some sightseeing around the city of Hue on foot, and then came back to the hotel to crash; I went to bed pretty early.  The next morning, I went out to walk around some more (still haven't used my bike since I parked it, but I noticed somebody had moved it a few feet away from where it was, which must have been quite a feat since my front wheel was locked).

I ran across a phone store, and decided to stop in.  I had gotten my phone stolen in Saigon a few days before, and bought one in Saigon that was the same model as the one that got stolen.  But my new phone had been overheating a lot, and the battery was depleting a LOT quicker than the battery in my stolen phone had.  The overheating was also making my camera shut down frequently.  I had decided that I was going to take it back to the store in Saigon to see if I could get it repaired or replaced (they had told me there was a one year warranty on it), but here was the same brand of phone store in Hue, so I decided to see if they would do something about it.  They were really helpful, they changed it out immediately even though I had thrown away the box and had left the earphones back at my hotel (of course, I hadn't planned on trying to trade in my phone when I went out walking, but since I ran across this store, I decided to give it a shot).  They told me they would give me the new phone without the box and earphones, and started helping me set it up.  But I couldn't sign into Google because it was telling me that it thought I was suspicious, and they needed to call my US number that I had given for verification.  Shit.  I'm not really surprised that they were suspicious, though, because I now have three different phones of the same model that have tried to log in to my account from Vietnam.  I couldn't do the verification to my US phone number from there, but I could probably do it from my hotel.  So I could not set up any Google stuff, and here I was all the way across town after just wandering aimlessly, with no access to Google Maps to help me get back to my hotel.  But I just went in the direction that I thought I should go in, and that worked out OK; I got back to my hotel fine.  Then when I got there, Google suddenly let me log in without the extra verification step that it had persistently asked me for at the store (I tried several times there).  So I was able to set up my phone, download needed apps, etc., for the SECOND time in just a few days.  And it seems so far like this new phone is not a lemon.

Shipping My Motorbike

Yesterday I was sitting in the lobby of my hostel in Saigon looking at the map of Vietnam and trying to figure out how I would be able to go to the places I want to go in the time I have left in the country, when Jessie, one of the women who works here at the hostel (I don't remember her Vietnamese name) told me that I can put my motorbike on a train and also head somewhere by train, so that opened up a whole new realm of possibilities to me.  I made a reservation on a train to Hue, but was told that I would have to go to the station two days before I was leaving to buy a ticket for my motorbike and have it shipped as cargo.

So today I set off for the train station on my motorbike to have it shipped to Hue.  I got to the station and parked in the parking lot, which charges 3000 dong to park there; it is maybe around 15 cents.  But I really didn't have to park there, as I soon found out.  The thing was that I didn't know for sure if they were going to take my motorbike right then or if I would just buy a ticket and then bring my motorbike when I was leaving.  But it turned out that they did take my motorbike right then.  They drained the gas out of it in preparation for shipping it, took off the mirrors and taped them to the rack, and covered the handlebars in cardboard.  I asked if I could ship the helmet with it, so I wouldn't have to lug it around with me.  The first guy I asked said no, but someone else who appeared to have more authority stepped up and said that I could.  I set it on the rack after they put the mirrors there, and made hand motions like, “are you going to tie/tape it up?”, and the authoritative guy nodded to indicate “yes”. I hope.  I stuck around for a while to see what they would do with it, but my helmet just sat there on the rack.  I certainly hope that it arrives with my bike.  For that matter, I hope my bike arrives OK with no problems, although it probably will.  I'll have to figure out how to get some gasoline into the tank, since they drained it.

The train to Hue will be about a twenty hour journey, and I will head up there in a couple of days.  This will be the first time I've taken a train in Vietnam, and actually the first time for me to journey by train anywhere in Southeast Asia, so I'll get to see what the trains are like.  I hope to ride down the coast back to Saigon and stop in several places on the way.  Taking the train will probably save me somewhere between a few days to a week of travel, though I wouldn't necessarily have to come back the same way I went up.

I decided to just walk back to the hostel from the train station, since it was only a few kilometers, and I wanted to take my time and check out some more stuff I hadn't seen yet.  I stopped by the Independence Palace, and was going to check it out, but I had gotten there too late...it closes from 11:30 in the morning until 1 in the afternoon, and I got there right after 11:30.  Maybe I'll head back in that direction this afternoon, maybe not.

So I have no motorbike for the next couple of days that I am in Ho Chi Minh City.  I doubt it will matter much because I have been walking almost everywhere anyway.  BTW, some people don't know that Ho Chi Minh City, HCMC, and Saigon are all the same place.  I talked to a guy the other day who had no idea.  Just in case you didn't know, they are.

At The US Consulate in HCMC

After some of the recent adventures that I have been through, it turns out that my passport is getting pretty full, and I will probably have to renew it fairly soon, not because it is about to expire, but because I am getting close to running out of pages.  Most countries that one can visit require a minimum of two blank pages in a passport to enter; some require four blank pages.  Right now I have six full pages left and spaces here and there for individual stamps on some pages.  But some countries take up a full page for their visa and then maybe a quarter of the adjoining page for the validity stamp.  Since I renewed my Vietnam visa, there are two full pages in my passport for the visas, and then multiple stamps on the next page.  I only had to get one visa sticker for Laos even though I renewed it; they were able to renew it in Luang Prabang with only a stamp, but if I had renewed it by leaving and returning, I would have gotten another full-page visa sticker.

So I have a conundrum coming up.  My Russian visa is in the passport I have now, and Russia does not allow a visa to be valid in an old passport (most other countries do allow you to have a visa in an expired passport, and then show it along with your new passport, but Russia does not allow that).  And I am hoping to visit Russia a few more times in the next few years, since I have a multiple-entry, three-year visa to Russia.  But Russia only allows you to transfer a visa to a new passport at the consulate or embassy where you got the visa, which in my case, was the consulate in Houston.  So I would have to either return to the US to transfer the visa to a new passport, or, possibly, mail my old passport and new passport (once I get one) to a visa service agency in the US to have that done and then have both mailed back.  I probably can't do that while I'm in a country where the mail service is sketchy, though I could do it by private carrier and pay through the nose...but I have time constraints that make it almost impossible.

So when I was in Laos, I figured out what I thought was a workaround to this problem.  Under certain circumstances (and it looked like this circumstance would qualify), one can apply for a second valid passport.  Usually this is only available in situations where it would be just about impossible for one's travel to continue without the second passport.  A good example is if one is going to Israel, and then to one of the Arabic countries that bars entry to anyone with an Israeli stamp in their passport (even though Israel will put their stamp in a separate card rather than in your passport if you request it).  That way, you can get the Israeli stamp in one passport, and stamps from any countries you enter via a land border, such as the West Bank or Jordan (because these stamps are circumstancial evidence that you entered Israel and grounds for some Arabic countries to deny you entry), and then get your stamps for the Arabic countries in the other passport.

My plan therefore changed from entering Vietnam somewhere in the middle and slowly making my way down to Saigon, to heading directly to Saigon so I could visit the consulate and get a second passport, then heading back up to the middle of Vietnam.  It took me about a week to get from Southern Laos to Saigon, stopping to rest in cities along the way and do some sightseeing.  I made an appointment with the US Consulate to get the second passport, and got together all my forms and documents to get it happening.

When I got to the US Consulate, there was a huge line stretching down the block.  But it turned out I didn't have to wait in the line, since the line was for non-US citizens applying for visas to the US.  US citizens could just go on through, going through security, of course.  I had researched embassy visits and it was a good thing I did, because there are a number of prohibited items that you can't bring into a US embassy or consulate, and they won't let you leave the items anywhere on the premises; you will just be turned away and have to make a new appointment.  You can't bring in a cellphone, any keys with electronic fobs, any memory sticks or cards, any cameras, etc.  So I left all those items in my locker at the hostel, and just went there with my identification and documents.

I showed up for my appointment, and presented all my documents, and my letter requesting a second passport, and everything seemed to be going fine.  They explained the procedure whereby I would get my second passport sent to me by courier, and I listed the hostel's address, after letting the hostel know that I would have it sent there.

But then it all went wrong.  I got called up to the window again, and was told that they might not be able to issue me a second passport, because there was a requirement for a second passport that I have a letter from my employer justifying my travel.  I told them I don't have an employer, and they said that they probably couldn't do it then, but they were going to look into it more to see if they could find a workaround.  I was completely baffled by the fact that they were seeming to tell me that I had to be employed to get a second passport.  I went to sit back down while they researched it further, and a woman tapped me on the shoulder, and said she overheard what they told me, and she had gotten a second passport a few years ago without having to have a letter from an employer.  So maybe it is a new thing.

Well, they called me up to the window again, and told me that they could not issue me a second passport, and gave me the cite to the rules in the Foreign Affairs Manual (FAM) that supposedly explained why I couldn't get it.  So much for that plan.  At least they refunded the passport fee that I had paid.  Now I have to figure out something else.  I probably have enough passport pages to get to Russia once, but probably not after that; I'd have to get the visa transferred in the US to visit further.  So after I got back to the hostel, I went to look up the rules in the FAM online to see what they had to say...and the cites they gave me had no text at all, just said, “Unavailable”.  WTF? The rules they used to turn me down were unavailable for me to read?  What does that mean? Are they classified?  Or just not available for some other reason? It was getting obvious that getting a second passport was just not going to happen, at least not in Saigon, maybe I can convince someone at another embassy to do it.  But it looks like the second passport thing is just not going to happen, and I'll have to figure out some other workaround.  More than likely, I'll just visit Russia once on my current passport, and then apply for a new passport at some point after that, and then any other Russia visits will have to happen after I get the visa transferred via the Houston Russian Consulate, but until then, my Russian visa will be temporarily invalid.  This kind of has a snowball effect that changes around all the plans I had for travel, but I really don't know yet the extent to which my plans will be affected.  But it was my own country that messed up my travel plans, not any of the countries I wanted to visit.  And now I am hearing that Europe may start requiring US citizens to get visas to visit there.  If they go through with that, it will add some additional hassle once I want to visit Europe, but at least that is manageable with planning.  And, likely, it will require a visa sticker that will take up more valuable space in my passport.

From Don Det to Sanamxai

I made my way down to Ban Nakasang, Laos, which is where I needed to cross over to Don Det Island in the 4000 Islands of Laos on the Mekong River. It didn't take me long to find the ferry crossing from  Ban Nakasong to Don Det.  There were special boats that took motorbikes across the river to the island; they consisted of two little dugout boats about the size of canoes, with a platform between the two, and one engine running the whole contraption.  I had read online about the possibility of one's bike getting dumped into the river while perched atop the motorcycle ferry, but luck was with me and I made it across intact.

Once I got on the island, my first thing to do was to get a place to stay.  I rode up the main road through the village a bit, then a friendly German woman asked me if I needed a place to stay, and I went ahead and stayed there.  It was a nice guesthouse with lots of room, but I wish I had gone a little longer and found one of the bungalows with hammocks along the water. After I got settled, I took a motorcycle ride around Don Det Island to see the sights there. First I went down the road on the east coast of the island, the sunrise side.  There were a whole bunch of little restaurants offering “happy” pizzas, cakes, brownies, and shakes.  Then I went down the middle road on the island, which was not very picturesque at all and just ran between a bunch of farms.  The road was very bumpy and rough. At one point, the chain came off my bike. I struggled with it a bit, but didn't have any tools to help get it back on.   One guy stopped where I was wrestling with the bike and tried to help fix it, but he didn't have tools so he told me to wait while he went and got some tools.  He came back after about ten minutes, and tried to work on my bike, but he stripped the outside of the nut a bit using the wrong size wrench.  I thanked him, and said I would pay him and then find someone else to do ti.  After asking around a bit, the locals referred me to another guy, who successfully fixed it and tightened up the chain, which had gotten really loose.  Success.  I was able to get back on the bike and ride again.

I took a bridge on my bike from Don Det Island to Don Khon Island. The roads were very rugged and bumpy, and the island was more desolate and wild, though there were some tourist accoutrements in the north part of Don Khon. Once you get further south, it's all fairly wild.  At one point, I heard a huge noise to my left, and there were a whole bunch of water buffalo stampeding in my direction.  The center of the stampede was in front of me, but I was still on the sides of it.  I quickly started walking my motorbike backwards, and got it about a hundred meters back, and was able to avoid the stampede, hoping that there were no stray animals still to come out of the bush.

I explored around Don Khon island some more.  Don Khon was a lot bigger than Don Det, but much wilder.  I didn't get signal down there, so I had no online map, but I managed to make it back toward the north part of the island, where there was signal again.  I couldn't figure out why I kept missing the road that went to the bridge...I finally figured out that the roads on Google Maps didn't meet and there was an overpass to the road I was on that led to the bridge back to Don Det Island.  So I found a little side path up the hill that led to the overpass, and I was able to cross the bridge back to Don Det.

Later that night, I had dinner at one of the restaurants on the river, and I met Chido and Desi there.  They had been traveling together for a bit, and later that night we all went back to my guesthouse room to just chill for a while.

The next morning, I ended up walking along the sunset side of Don Det Island.  There were a whole bunch of spots on that side of the island where I could wander out into places among the 4000 Islands where the Mekong has receded or changed course, so the ground was walkable but sometimes muddy.

Walking down the west side of Don Det Island some more. I ended up walking all the way to the south tip of the island, where the bridge to the next island is. I walked back up the east side of Don Det Island. I ended up walking the whole circumference of the island that morning. It's not huge, but it's about a two hour walk. There are ruins of a century-old pier along the east side of Don Det Island. It looks like a section of a bridge that just starts and stops out of nowhere.

I met two guys named Tom on Don Det.  The first Tom was Tom from Israel, who had just gotten into a bad motorcycle accident, and had his knees and elbows bandaged up.  He just mostly lay on the floor next to a table in this bar and restaurant across the street from his guesthouse, while he waited to heal up from his accident.  I saw him there most of the time every time I walked by that bar.  The second Tom was Tom from the Czech Republic, who told me that I solved just about all of the IT problems he was having.  I helped him get the money in his SIM card account into a plan so he could use his phone.  He had put the money in the account, but not activated a plan, so I showed him the code to dial to choose the plan he wanted from Lao Telecom.  I can't remember what the other thing I helped him solve was, but he was grateful. Some of the people around were thinking about taking a “happy” cruise offered by some bar on the sunset side, but it turned out the bar wasn't doing it that day.

When I was leaving the next morning, I was walking my motorbike up to the boat ramp, and someone pointed out that my tire looked flat.  It was not yet completely flat, but was losing air rapidly.  I decided to take the ferry across and get it fixed on the other side.  My incident where the chain came off made me realize there were no bike repair shops on Don Det, just individuals who are willing to fix things.  I once again managed to get my motorbike off Don Det Island, back across the Mekong River, once again without my bike and my gear spilling over into the river.  But then once I got to the other side, my tire was completely flat.  I had to walk the bike, pushing it through the beach sand and then up a steep ramp, to try to find a mechanic.  And I found a little bike repair shop in Ban Nakasong.  They fixed the flat and I was ready to go.  I didn't realize that to fix the flat, you have to take the brake assembly apart and put it back together again, but I watched him doing that.

I headed back up Laos Highway 13 to get to a place where I could cross over to Vietnam.  On the way up, there was a particularly nasty looking tour bus wreck.  It had been run off the road, and there was a huge spider web crack/dent in the windshield on the driver's side.  I had already seen a couple of bad motorcycle wrecks along this road previously.  I found a road on a map, south of Pakse, that I decided to take. This road, Laos Highway 18, ended up being the most challenging road I had been on in Laos. It was totally unpaved and extremely rough. I was riding up and down steep rocky and sandy hills, crossing many bridges with just rickety boards. One bridge was closed, but I didn't find out until the end, when I had to slowly back my bike off the bridge. There wasn't enough room to turn my bike around, so all I could do was back it up.  When I got to the beginning of the bridge, I had to back it down a little sandy hill, and the bike slipped out of my grip and I dropped it.  Some guy fishing at the stream helped me pick it up with all my gear strapped on and then I crossed the stream on my bike. I had to ford six streams along the way with my bike, which were each pretty deep. The first time, I just stopped right before the water, wondering what to do, when I saw a local guy just purr right through the water, so I started up my bike and followed his lead.  It wasn't so bad, but my pants got wet up to knee-deep. In the last one, I got stuck in mud in the middle, and pulled the bike out by gently accelerating and guiding with my feet like ski poles. My pants got soaked up past the knees from the crossings, and my shoes got caked with mud. Moving along was slow (at one point, I timed myself and I only went three kilometers in 20 minutes), and so I didn't get to go as fast as I thought I would, and there was no way to get to my destination during the day. So I ended up riding at night in pitch darkness on this difficult road for a couple of hours, even crossing some board bridges almost blind at night, trying to find a village with a guesthouse, and I finally found one after several unsuccessful attempts. To top it off, the rack on my bike snapped off from all the hard bumping, taking my tail light with it, and forcing me to repack my gear on the seat, with the broken rack loaded on top, and I had to sit on the gas tank. I lost my jacket (it was bungee-corded on the back in case I needed it) and my water somewhere along the way when my rack failed. I was just completely exhausted, riding in the dark and hoping each village I arrived in would have a guesthouse.  I finally arrived in the village of Sanamxai, tired, hungry, thirsty, and emotionally spent.  There was one guesthouse in the village, and I jumped on it.  I was so happy to finally stop.  I motioned to my mouth, because I was really hungry, as I hadn't eaten all day, and they fed me some rice and vegetables.  I walked around the village at night a bit; there wasn't much open at night and there wasn't much to see.  Then I collapsed into sleep at the guesthouse.

Leaving Vientiane for Savannakhet and Pakse

I left Vientiane and headed towards the general direction of Savannakhet, though the distance was so great that I was pretty sure that I was going to have to stop somewhere in between. And I was right. I ended up stopping in a little town right at the corner of Highways 13 and 8 in Laos at a guesthouse for the night. The room was only 50,000 kip for the night, or a little over six bucks, which was great, and I think it was the cheapest place I have stayed in Laos so far. It didn't have hot water (which was not a big deal because it was hot outside, and I didn't end up taking a shower in the one night I was there anyway), and it didn't have wi-fi in the room, but it did have wi-fi once I moved closer to the office, which was good enough for me. Actually, it probably would have been good enough even if it didn't have wi-fi. I have a Laos SIM card so I have phone signal in Laos. It only costs 50,000 kip, for 5 Gbs over an entire month, which is good enough for mundane tasks, and I just wait for wi-fi to upload pictures (sometimes I will upload just a few over the phone data) or to watch videos. I had a Vietnamese SIM card too, and I'll put it back into my phone once I get to Vietnam again.

I spent the next day heading down to Savannakhet. Southern Laos on Highway 13 is all coastal plains, in contrast to the Northern part of the country, in which there are a lot of mountainous areas. So the ride was not as spectacular when it came to scenery. I arrived in Savannakhet late in the afternoon and found a guesthouse pretty much right in the center of the city, which allowed me to just step outside and be right in the middle of things. Savannakhet is the second largest city in Laos, right behind Vientiane, and it has a large number of beautiful disintegrating French Colonial style buildings interspersed with Laotian shacks. There is a central square, Talaat Yen Plaza, in front of the Catholic Church, that turns into a vibrant night market after the sun goes down. It's probably the closest thing Savanakhet has to a downtown. I was astonished to walk into a convenience store and be in line behind a boy who looked about five years old buying two packs of cigarettes. Just a few blocks away from the central square is the Mekong River, with Thailand right on the other side. The first night I was there, I met a French guy and a Finnish guy in the common area. The French guy said he was 28 years old and was traveling with a brother and a friend, but they had gotten temporarily separated and his two companions were staying in Vientiane; they were due to meet up the next day. He was traveling on a budget of 50,000 kip a day, which was impressive to me, because I was definitely trying to travel cheaply, but even the places I stayed were always more than that. He kept his costs down by WWOOFing, so he would work on farms for free. He said that Couchsurfing didn't really work around Southeast Asia, and I told him I hadn't tried it, but that had been what I had heard from others too. He also did some hitchhiking sometimes, but people in this region didn't really understand hitchhiking, and those that did pick him up wanted some money. I thought that was reasonable, but he seemed pretty impoverished, so it was probably a burden on his budget. The Finnish guy was in his sixties, and he was traveling through Laos and Vietnam by bicycle. He said he had left Ho Chi Minh City and headed slowly this way toward Laos, and he was averaging about 100 kilometers a day. He turned in pretty early because he wanted to get on the road early in the morning; he was already gone by the time I got up.

The next day, I explored Savannakhet a little more. I wandered around for a good part of the day, came back for a bit, and then went out again in the evening into the night. After returning from exploring the city at night, I was going to stay in the guesthouse, but I got a little hungry, so I decided to explore the city a little more. What I didn't realize is that the guesthouse closed fairly early, so the front gate was already padlocked shut with a thick chain at 9:30 at night. I poked around the front desk and found the key to the padlock. I figured I would just run out and get some takeout food from a restaurant and come right back. I ended up taking the key with me so I could get back in, but that meant that everybody else was locked in the guesthouse. When I got outside, almost everything was closed; I guess Savannakhet closes early, but that is the case for many towns in Laos. But I did find one place open near the square, ordered a quick meal for takeout, and then snuck back to the guesthouse. Hopefully nobody else tried to leave in the time I was out, but I wasn't out for long.

The next day, I left Savannakhet and headed for Pakse. It was getting even hotter as I moved further south. But it cools off pretty quickly at night. The highway is straight, flat, and well-paved for the most part, so I was able to move much faster for the most part. I noticed there were a lot of passive police presences along the way, that is, little stations where there were police sentries and cones to narrow the road, but they didn't seem to stop anyone, at least not anyone that I saw. I also saw some gruesome motorcycle accidents along this stretch of the road. One motorbike had been hit by a car, and was barely recognizable. I can't imagine that the driver survived.

Pakse had a lot more foreign tourists than Savannakhet did, and also had a lot more international restaurants; it seemed like it was geared more for tourists. I have heard that a lot of expats live in places like Vientiane and Savannakhet, which are right on the Thai border, because they can easily renew their visas once they run out by crossing the border for the afternoon, maybe just to have lunch, and then returning. If you have no baggage, it is a pretty straightforward thing to get a new visa-on-arrival just by crossing and coming back. Although I have to admit, nobody ever checked my baggage when I crossed into Laos. Once you get down to Pakse, though it is on the Mekong River, it is no longer on the Thai border, because the Mekong has veered wholly into Laos by that time and is no longer the border marker. Still, Thailand is pretty close.

The hotel I stayed at in Pakse was once again right in the center of town and was only 150,000 kip a night. This one at least had hot water and decent wi-fi. There were also a lot of really good restaurants very close by; I ended up eating several meals at an Indian restaurant across the street. There was also a small grocery store right across the street from the hotel. There were a lot of foreign guests staying there so there were a lot of people to chat with in the little patio outside the lobby, which doubled as a table area for the hotel's restaurant and bar.

Pakse was interesting but not terribly spectacular, so I decided to check out Don Kho Island just a few kilometers north of Pakse. Very few tourists visit this island, and the only way to get here is to take a small local motorized dugout boat from the small village of Ban Saphai. The first thing I arrived at up the steps was the Vat Chompet temple, which is right up a steep set of steps directly above the boat docking area, and is inhabited by Buddhist monks. I met a friendly monk in an orange robe as soon as I ascended the steps, and he spoke some English and seemed like he wanted to practice with me, so we engaged each other in conversation. Unfortunately, I only know a few words in Lao, so I was not able to reciprocate.

After wandering around the temple grounds, I walked south along the east coast of Don Kho Island. There were a number of weaving houses right off this path as silk weaving is one of the major activities of the island. The weaving houses were out in the open, and you could just walk right though them; everybody was going about their daily activities and tourists were free to just wander right through the bottom part of the houses, which for the most part were just outdoors, but there was usually a concrete foundation and some posts holding up a building above the ground level area where the weavers were working. There were only two other tourists on the island that I knew of, a British couple from London that I kept running into over and over again as I explored the island.

Next I went down the path that went down the middle of Don Kho Island, crossing over to the other side of the island. There was a school on that side of the island, and I think it was the only school on the island, so it probably taught all grades. The beach on the west side of Don Kho Island was very nice and I descended to the shoreline to check it out and dip my feet in the river. Then I crossed back over to the east side of the island, and explored the north part. I covered a good deal of the island, as it is very small. One strange thing that I saw was a cow climbing a ladder up the side of the steep cliff on the east side, to get to the top of the cliff and onto the path. I have to admit that was the first time I had ever seen a cow climb a ladder.

I left Don Kho Island and headed back to Ban Saphai on the mainland. The boat guy wanted me to wait for the other two tourists so he could bring us all back at the same time and not have to make two trips. But it wasn't long before they showed up, maybe only about five minutes after I arrived at the docking area.

Once I got back on the boat to Ban Saphai, I walked around the town a bit, as I hadn't explored it before I took the boat to Don Kho. There was a booth in Ban Saphai where a woman had some sort of mill to crush sugar cane and make a pulpy beverage out of it, so I tried one. She ran the sugar cane through several times. The beverage was nothing special and was too sweet for my tastes, so I watered it down a bit with some drinking water. It was also an unnatural looking yellow color though there was nothing in it but the pure sugar cane squeezings. I also checked out the temple in Ban Saphai, Vat Saphai Kang, while I was there. Then I rode my bike back to Pakse, and did some more exploring there before coming back to the hotel for the night. The next morning I took off to head further south.

An Elephant Trek, A Cave Visit, and Visa Renewal in Luang Prabang

One of the last things I did in the Luang Prabang area was to plan an elephant trek near the village of Pak Ou. I wanted to take the trip by bus so I could just relax and let somebody else do the driving.  We took a bus about an hour and a half north of town to the village of Pak Ou, and when we arrived, there were several elephants there milling around the town.  Apparently the village has sort of a symbiotic relationship with these elephants.  The villagers guard them against poachers, and then use them for a few hours a day to do some moving and hauling chores, and to take visitors on treks.  Then they let them loose to hang out in the jungle around the village.  I hope that the villagers treat them well.

Each of us on the tour bus were assigned elephants to mount. Some elephants carried two or three people, but I was on the elephant I was riding alone, except for when the handler mounted the elephant with me.  We had to get on the porch of the second floor of a two-story building to get on the elephants.  The handler of my elephant tried to get me to ride on the elephant's neck, bareback, but the elephant started taking off and I did not feel comfortable there AT ALL.  I felt like I was just about to tumble off the elephant as it lurched from side to side.  So I had the handler lead the elephant back to the staging area, and I got in the basket on top of the elephant instead of sitting on its neck.  Once all of us were perched atop our assigned elephants, then we went trekking through the jungle.  The elephants went up and down steep hills, and through areas that I never would have thought an elephant could get through.

After trekking through the jungle for about forty-five minutes, we returned to the village.  The handlers then gave us a brief tutorial of the words that they had taught the elephants, and these were the commands that the elephants understood.  Then the handlers told us we were going to bathe the elephants.  I had no idea what that meant, but they told me I had to change into a swimsuit.  I wasn't aware of this beforehand, and hadn't brought a swimsuit with me.  They rustled one up from somebody in town, and I changed into it.  I figured that I had to wear the swimsuit because I might get splashed while bathing the elephant?

Next they had me mount the elephant, but not from a second story like I had before.  They had the elephant kneel down on its front legs, and I had to climb up the elephant from its front legs.  And there was no basket on the elephant to sit in this time.  They had me sitting on the neck of the elephant, which I was just as uncomfortable to do as it had been the last time I tried that, and I was not very secure with that at all.  Just as I got atop the elephant, the elephant started walking into the Mekong River, and I was not feeling very well positioned or secure atop the elephant, sitting on its neck; I was basically just clinging on for dear life.  When the elephant got into the river, it suddenly reared up on its hind legs, dumping me into the Mekong River.  The guides were all laughing their asses off, but I was not terribly amused.  I still had open wounds from my motorcycle accident and was not happy to be dumped into the river without warning.  I figured this was just kind of a joke that the guides pull on the unsuspecting tourists, but I bet they wouldn't do that to their grandmothers.  Later I Googled “Mekong River” and found out that it was loaded with pollution and disease, and I learned about horrible things like liver flukes, lung flukes, and other parasites you can get from the river, and also found out that there are things in the soil around the river that make their way up your body through your feet and do awful things to you.  And I had come out of the river and walked back to the village barefoot.  Great.

After the elephant trek, we all had lunch in the village, and then took a small dugout boat across the Mekong River to Pak Ou Caves.  It turned out that the couple who took the boat with me (they were from a different tour bus) were from my hometown of El Paso, Texas, where I grew up.  Actually, they had grown up in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, right across the border (which is where I went to elementary school), and had moved to El Paso, where they were going to UT El Paso.

The caves had been transformed into a Buddhist shrine.  They were filled with sculptures and statues and all kinds of Buddhist icons and offerings.  There was a set of upper and lower caves, and we toured through all the caves.  Then after exploring the caves for a while, we took the little dugout boat back, and returned to Luang Prabang.  We briefly stopped at Whisky Village, where the villagers distill various spirits and make wines, before returning to the town.

When I was on the way back, I started feeling a little bit sick.  Once I returned to my guesthouse, I was really sick.  I thought that something really bad was going on...I had been afraid of infection with my motorcycle accident wounds, and I was afraid that I had a systemic staph infection, or that I had caught something horrible from the river when the elephant dumped me.  But it was probably just coincidental, and I was only sick for about a day, and then I was fine again.

I stayed in Luang Prabang just a couple more days, but on the day before I was to leave Luang Prabang, I found out online that I could renew my Laos visa in Luang Prabang if I wanted to, so I decided to take advantage of that opportunity.  There are two ways to extend your initial Laos visa-on-arrival: one is to leave the country and get a new visa-on-arrival, and the other is to tack on up to an extra month by going to the immigration office in Luang Prabang or Vientiane (and maybe some other cities, I'm not sure), and doing it that way.  I figured that since I still time in Luang Prabang, I could extend my visa.  I had read online that they would do it the same day.  So the next day, I went off in search of the immigration office.  I first Googled it, but it was not at the spot that Google said it was; there was some sort of resort there.  The people at the resort thought I had to do it at the police station, and they gave me directions to a police station.  But I got there and found out that I had to go to a different police station, which I did, and it turned out to be the right place.  Also I found out that they would not renew it the same day; they told me I had to come back the next day.  That altered my plans a little, because I was planning to leave early in the morning as I had a long ride to get to the next town.  But it turned out not to be too bad.  At first they told me that I had to come back at three in the afternoon the next day, but when I told them that I was leaving and needed to travel, they told me that they could have it ready by eleven in the morning and to come then.  So I showed up at eleven the next day, and they had it ready within ten minutes.  I already had my motorcycle packed up and had checked out of the guesthouse, so I just left town right after I got the visa extension.  Strangely enough, they extended my visa to February 29, which doesn't exist in this non-leap year, but I figured I would probably be out of Laos at least a couple of weeks before that anyway.

Hey, I Really Dig Your Rack

When I was pulling out of Sam Neua, Laos, several days ago, I had my gear all packed up on the back of my motorbike the way I usually pack it. I would lay down the big pack in the back, and stand up the smaller pack in front of it, using it as a back rest. Everything was going along fine, until about a half an hour out of town, I heard a loud metallic-sounding pop or twang coming from the back of my bike. Of course, being in the middle of desolate country, with no opportunity to repair anything that could have gone wrong, I immediately responded to the issue with denial. Everything has got to be OK. Just keep moving.

But everything was not quite OK. To be fair, nor was it catastrophic. After another half hour down the road, I decided to stop for a bit and see if there was a problem at the back of my bike. What had happened was that one of the front welds on my rack had broken loose. Of course, I wasn't terribly thrilled about this, as the rack was carrying all of my gear, but at least I had the other front weld and the back welds to hold my rack and my gear in place, and I could just continue hoping that they would hold, despite the laws of physics, which gave me a nagging suspicion that at least the other front weld would not last very long.

Everything was fine for a while, then I heard another pop, and this one was more muffled than the first one. Of course, I knew what had happened. The other front weld had given way. Now the rack was only held on with the back welds and bungee cords, with my gear weighing it all down in a bad way. Once again, denial was the solution I chose.

I went on for maybe another hour or so, and I finally summoned up the courage to look at the back of my bike and see how bad it was. It was not so good. The rack was listing about 45 degrees downward, rather than being perpendicular to the ground. This was not a sustainable situation. Fortunately, I responded with more denial, but this time, I knew that I had to hope that it would last at least until the next town where I could find a motorcycle shop where it could be fixed.

So I kept plundering forward into the back roads of Laos, with my nervous denial of the whole situation at hand at the forefront of my mind. I guess it's hard to call it denial if it is preoccupying your whole consciousness. But then again, if you're not doing anything about it...

Then, a little while later, I had a brainstorm; a revelation. Why don't I stop and re-pack my gear so it is almost completely on the seat rather than on the rack? Of course, this means that I will hardly have any seat left, and I'll be sitting way forward on the bike, almost on the gas tank. But that was worth a shot, and it was a step up from denial and inactivity, which surely would not have led to anything good.

So I stopped along the road, completely unpacked my gear, and then re-packed it much farther forward on the bike. I also packed the smaller pack on top of the bigger pack, instead of having one in front of the other. And that actually worked, and took the weight off the broken rack. The downside was that I was sitting way forward, and my long legs were terribly cramped riding like that. Also, since the whole gear package was now higher, and gave my bike a higher center of gravity, I had to be much more careful about tipping over on the side, especially when I was stopped, and especially in the case where my feet were on loose gravel supporting my bike while stopped. Also I had to pack it all just right to avoid the package moving to one side or the other, and getting everything off balance. But it was a sustainable solution, as long as I was careful about the things I needed to be careful about, and it took some pressure off as far as needing to find an immediate solution to the problem I was having.

In fact, it was such a usable solution, that despite the fact that I was sitting way forward and fairly uncomfortable, I didn't get it fixed for several days. I visited Phonsavan, knowing that I needed to get it fixed, but not really finding a place to do it, and being fairly rushed while I was there. Since I spent a week in Viang Xai to recover from my injuries from my motorcycle wreck, I was fairly behind in my itinerary (not that I had specified plans, but I knew covering Laos would be much more compressed in the month that I have for a visa here), and needed to make up the lost time. So I didn't get it fixed in Phonsavan.

Next, I stopped in Phou Khoun, which was a very tiny picturesque village (well, actually, it probably would have been picturesque, had it not been besotten with very thick fog the whole time I was there). I was only there for one night, and was completely soaked to the bone when I got there, because I had been riding in torrential rain the whole way there. So I mostly had to deal with the carnage to my stuff once I got there. Everything in my fanny pack was completely soaked, which was all my most important stuff. My passport was drenched. Everything in my wallet, and everything else in the pack was soaked as well. The fanny pack has really outlived its useful life; it is full of holes and the water resistant inner liner is almost completely deteriorated. If I were in the US or Europe, I would simply get another one of the same model, the Everest Extra Large, which is the most awesome waist pack that holds all my most necessary stuff, even though I always have to bolster the straps by sewing them up better, and sew up a couple corners that are always going to fail. But I know these restrictions, and I can prepare for them; in fact, I have on every one I have had. Any waist pack that I buy here will not be nearly big enough. In fact, I bought one in Thailand, and there was no way it would carry even half the stuff the one I have now does. So I'm just letting this one limp along much longer than I normally would have, relying on my old friend, denial. All of my other gear was OK; the repairs that I made to my raincovers for both packs held up pretty well. But clearly I need a better strategy to keep the contents of my fanny pack dry. Right now my interim solution is to put everything in a big ziplock bag inside the fanny pack.

Also, the place I stayed in Phou Khoun had a layer of awful slime on the floor. It felt like absolute, sickening, raw disease when I walked on it with my bare feet. So I tried not to walk on it without covering my feet with my sandals, but there were some times when it was unavoidable. I had stopped at one place first, in the pouring rain, shivering with discomfort and dying to stop and change out of my wet clothes. But the boy I dealt with couldn't find his mom to get me situated, and so finally he just told me to leave. I was not terribly happy with that, and groaned as I got back on my bike in the pouring rain to find another shelter. As soon as I found the place where I ended up staying, I was just happy to be able to change clothes and assess the water damage to my gear. The strange thing was that at this place, all my dealings were with a boy who looked about ten years old. I never saw an adult at all. He showed me the room, gave me the key, and collected my money the next day. I think I was the only one staying at that place. There was no wifi, but that was the least of my worries. If I had gone down the road about a hundred more meters, there were some much better looking places where it seemed that all the expats stopping through town were staying. But this place was cheap, it was decent enough, and I was dying to be situated. The bathroom only had a raised squat toilet on a platform, and you couldn't even put your feet in the footholds for it, because they were covered with the same awful slime the floor was covered with, and you would just slip right off and fall. But it was good enough, dammit. And I would only be there one night.

So I had more important stuff to deal with rather than fixing the rack, and putting my gear on the seat worked, though it was not terribly comfortable. I left out all my wet stuff to dry the best it could. I ended up packing up the wetter clothes in a bag, and wearing the rest. I probably could have worn them all, and they would have dried on the way, because the weather was great the next day, even though the roads were not. I left Phou Khoun the next morning on the long, winding trek through crappy mountainous roads to Luang Prabang, a journey that was little over 100 kilometers, but took all day due to the terrible quality of the roads, and the amount of winding that I had to do on hairpin turns through the mountains. It always seems like right when I get to the hairiest turns on the mountains, that is when the roads get the worst, with mud and/or gravel, and huge potholes or washouts right around the corner. But I guess that is the nature of the hairpin turn. It is always going to be in the place where the water washes down off of the mountain, and causes the maximum amount of erosion, so the road there will by nature be of the worst quality.

Then I got to Luang Prabang. I was rattled from the long, bouncy, unsettling trip all day through terrible roads perched on cliffs that would be unsurvivable, would one happen to fall off of them. There is a thing that happens to your brain bouncing around all day from the vibrations of driving over bouncy roads; it is probably comparable to a mild concussion. It's like when you're swimming in the ocean all day, and when you get out, you can still feel the waves as though they are still pounding you. Well, I could still feel my cerebral matter being battered against the side of my head for quite a while after I stopped riding. Also, I was loaded up with clothing to keep my warm in the high, cold, windy mountains, but now I had descended into a valley for the first time in a long time, and I was really hot. I needed to find a place to stay where I could peel off my sweaty clothes and get comfortable, and I was definitely not comfortable at that point.

There were so many options for places to stay, but I didn't know what the prices would be like, and what the amenities would be. So for the first time since Hanoi, I decided to book a place online. I booked a guesthouse that I figured would be decent. But the problem was, it had no address online, and I couldn't find the damned place at all. A restaurant owner saw me stopped, muddling over Google Maps trying to figure out where the place was, right after Google Maps had taken me to a place that was definitely not where the guesthouse was, and it didn't seem to have the guesthouse on the map at all. He invited me in and offered to call the place, so I looked for the phone number, found it, and gave it to him. He called, and whoever he talked to was no help at all, was apparently a complete jerk to him, and hung up on him. He showed me on the map where he thought it was, so I headed off in that direction. I poked aimlessly around that area, but could not find the place anywhere. I was really frustrated, because I had paid for a non-refundable reservation online that I had no way of finding out the location of. So I sent a message to Booking.com, the outfit I had booked it though, begging for help in finding the place. I still have yet to hear from them. Go fuck yourself, Booking.com.

Anyway, first stopped at the spot the guy from the restaurant thought was where it was at on my map. There was a guesthouse there, but nobody spoke English. I tried to tell them I had a reservation at the Souksavong Guesthouse, and tried to ask if this was the place? Everything was written in Lao script, so I couldn't tell. They very enthusiastically tried to get me to take a room, but I couldn't confirm that this was the place I had the reservation, and I had a funny feeling it wasn't. So I milled around a while, but it just didn't feel right. I would have maybe stayed there, but I had paid a lot of money (Luang Prabang is pretty expensive compared to the other places I have been in Laos), and I didn't want to double-pay. So, out of frustration, and with no other option at that point, I just methodically went up and down every street in the area. I stopped at a tourist assistance place, but nobody there spoke English, and that added to my utter despair. Finally I stopped at a guesthouse that had a similar name to the one I had booked; the person at the counter spoke English, and knew where my guesthouse was! I was about to jump for joy. I went down the street a ways, and it was right where they told me it was. I was so fucking happy.

I was glad to have a room, but even though the whiteboard by the front desk indicated there were only two people other than myself staying in the whole place, they put me in a back building with no wifi, in an upstairs area with very steep stairs with no lights leading to the second floor. I don't know why they did that when there seemed to be downstairs rooms right next to the wifi router in the front building. But nobody spoke English, and I was just happy to have a room. And I can always go to the front building to use the wifi.

Well, I've gotten way off track. This post is about my rack, and how it needed fixing. I spent the better part of one day trying to find a mechanic who could fix my rack. First I went to one mechanic, but he indicated he didn't do welding. I tried to see if he could just put on a new rack, but he just cut me off and kept saying no to everything, probably because of our inability to communicate in the same language. But he seemed to indicate there was someone down the road who did welding. He pointed straight down the road and then to the right. Great. So there was someone some indeterminate distance down the road, on some road that went to the right at some point, who might be able to fix it. Luckily I actually found the place he was talking about, down the road that first veered off to the right. But I pulled up to the place, tried to explain my problem, but the guy who seemed to be running things just waved me off as if to tell me to go away. Hell no. I was persistent. Finally one guy who spoke a little English told me to come back at two o'clock. Okay, that was progress, hopefully. I went back to the guesthouse and laid on the bed to relax for a while. Then I set off about a quarter to two back to the place. Guy who at first waved me off was working with a welding rig when I got there; that was a good sign. He finished a job for somebody else, and motioned me to bring my bike up. There is a bigger rack tied to the rack attached to my bike with a bungee cord; that was set up by the people who sold me my bike in Hanoi. It sounds iffy, but it is actually very solid. He motioned that I would have to remove the bungee cord and the other rack so he could work on it. That was fine, but it was tied really tightly and I had trouble getting it off my hand. I struggled with it for quite a while, and tried to ask him through pantomime if he had any pliers. He handed me a machete. Well, no, dude, I can't cut it off, because I still need the cord to tie it back on once I get it off, and no telling if I'll be able to find another one in Laos. But I would have done it as a last resort. He just walked away. So I kept struggling with it by hand to not much avail. I tried to cut it with the machete, but that didn't seem to work too well. So I poked around his shop looking for any tool that could help me, hopefully a pair of pliers. But I didn't see anything. Finally, I found a nail, and I was able to pry the knots in the bungee cord loose with the nail. Success! I removed the top rack, and he came back a few minutes later, and got to work on it with the welding rig. He was able to re-weld the two broken welds pretty quickly, and my rack was fixed! Yay!

On the way to the welding shop the first time, I had seen a place where someone was washing a motorbike. I wouldn't have even known that service was available there if I hadn't seen someone doing it. So I made a mental note to stop there after I went to the welding place later in the afternoon. And I did stop by there. They were willing to wash my bike. But, let me tell you, at every place I stopped at today, the first mechanic shop, the welding shop, and the bike washing place, there was a lot of rapid-fire talk in Lao between people there, in which I heard them say “farang” a lot; that was the only word I could pick out, and I heard it a lot. “Farang” is a derisive term for foreigner, especially one of European descent. So at all these places I stopped at, they were discussing among themselves about how this (bleep) foreigner was all up in their grill. Oh well.

The bike washing place was also a restaurant of sorts, and they invited me to come in and sit down while the guy washed my bike. I watched all sorts of fascinating transactions at the restaurant while the guy was washing my motorcycle. My bike was thoroughly caked in mud from the rides through dusty roads in the mountains, so it took a while to wash. In the meantime, I watched one customer come up to get some stuff that the woman behind the counter prepared by grating or peeling some stuff off of something that vaguely looked like okra, but was filled with fibrous material. Then she mixed it with some peppers and other stuff, and gave it to the customer in a bag. Another customer came up, and she cut some flesh off of what looked like a squash or melon (it might have been the fleshy part of a coconut), ground it up in a huge mortar and pestle, mixed it with some other stuff, and then gave the customer a taste to make sure it was satisfactory, and then sent it off in a bag with the customer. Many people came to order rice dishes, or some thing they prepared in a wok over a fire with some sort of egg crepe-like thing. They would crack an egg, mix it with some kind of batter, and then coat most of the hot wok with it so it was very thinly spread. Then they would add various vegetables to it, and a bit of some kind of meat that they had wrapped in several packages of banana leaves hanging from the wall. They would take one of these packages and add it to the mix, then wrap the whole thing in the egg crepe-y thing, and serve it. Some people took these in to-go containers rather than eating it there. The guy finished washing my bike, and did a great job, it was absolutely sparkling. So now my rack is fixed, my bike is clean, and at some point before I leave for the next town, I'll re-attach the bigger rack with the bungee cord.

Come Drink With Us!

Last night I was sitting in the little spot in front of the hotel in Vieng Xai that gets wi-fi, when one of the members of the hotel staff invited me to come drink with them. I accepted, and followed him to the room where they all hang out. On the side of the hotel, there are a bunch of big rooms that have garage-style huge metal doors that roll down from the top, and concrete floors, and they were all hanging out in one of those rooms. They were all men, sitting in a circle on the floor around a rug, with a lot of food on the rug, and some clear spirits in a big water bottle. I don't know what the booze was. I asked them what it was, and they told me the name, but I don't remember it, and I have no idea what it was made from. The staff and their friends hanging out were all Vietnamese living in Laos. They offered me some food, but I motioned that I was full because I had just come from a restaurant and was truly stuffed. But they insisted that I try a few bites so I did.

They were sitting around, laughing and joking, cross-legged around the rug. I have always been uncomfortable sitting cross-legged, even when I was a kid, and with the wounds on my knee, it was even more difficult, but I persisted and sat with them for an hour or so, or maybe longer; I wasn't really paying attention to the time. One guy was smoking tobacco out of a bamboo bong, and others were smoking cigarettes; they offered me cigarettes, but I'm not a tobacco smoker, so I declined. I could not understand most of what they were saying, but they seemed to be having a great time, and it was cool to hang out with them. They were constantly pouring the booze into shot glasses and making toasts. Sometimes the toasts would be for everybody to join in on, and sometimes the toasts would be just between two members of the group. The first time one of the toasts between two people happened, I started to raise my glass, but then the guy next to me put his hand on my arm and made a “no” motion, so I realized that the whole group was not included. But most of the toasts were for the whole group. A couple of the guys in the group wanted to do individual toasts with me, so I obliged. And then there were a few more serious individual toasts, where the toasters shook hands in a way where they grasped up to the elbow; one guy did one of those with me. After each toast, they would pass the water bottle around and fill everybody's glass again for the next round. I wasn't really in on what the customs were, but I just tried to be jovial and a good sport, and hope that I didn't do anything seriously wrong, but I doubt I did.

As the night went on, it seemed like we were communicating better. I was getting a lot of information across in Vietnamese, and understanding things they said when they said it slowly and with gestures and emphasis, to my surprise. I picked up on a lot of words I barely knew, but had had some exposure to. Only a couple of them spoke any English at all, and then only a few words. There is a guy at the hotel who speaks more English, not a whole lot, but more than the rest of the people who work here, but he was not there that night. One guy told me about the town he was from in Vietnam, and I found it on my phone on Google Maps, then he told me about a couple caves around there, which I also bookmarked on my phone. He told me to call him if I pass through his town, and gave me his Vietnamese phone number, because he would hook me up with friends in the area. So if I pass through there when I go back to Vietnam, I'll give him a call. My Vietnamese SIM card has a phone number and minutes, but my Laos SIM card is only data.

After sitting with them for a while, I begged off to go back to my room. I'm kind of a lightweight on drinking, so I had reached my limit fairly quickly, plus I was uncomfortable from sitting on the floor for so long. I bid them all goodbye and thanked them for inviting me to sit with them.

This morning, I woke up and went to the Indian restaurant down the street, and had breakfast and coffee there. Today I have to pack up to get ready to leave tomorrow. My stuff is strewn around the hotel room big time, so I'll have to gather it all up to pack. I was hoping my wounds would not be seeping any more by now, but they still are somewhat. But hopefully I have healed up enough to be on the move again. I think healing will take quite a while, and I'll have to take it easy for a while.

Getting Ready To Move On In Laos

Today was just another day devoted to wound care and gear repair. I think that I have repaired the last of my gear, or at least gotten as far as I'm going to get with that. My windbreaker/rain jacket had some tears in in from the wreck, and the clear tape that I have stuck to it pretty well to cover the holes. I'll get rid of it, though, as soon as I find an adequate replacement. The clear tape also stuck well to my small rain cover, which was fairly tattered, but now all the holes are covered. It'll probably be a while before I can replace that, but if I go back to Hanoi at some point, I can get one there because that is where I got it. My other rain cover for my big backpack was relatively unscathed, surprisingly.

The hotel does people's laundry...they did mine for free since I stayed a whole week here. Normally they charge 20,000 kip, which is about $2.50, a kilo. I got my clothes back today and, miraculously, they got all the blood out of my pants. I don't know what they did, but there is a slight faded spot where the blood was. But that's fine with me. There are some tears around the knee, but they are still wearable without looking gruesome. My great L. L. Bean shirt jacket that I was wearing when I wrecked had no outward signs at all of the bloody elbow underneath, but there was some blood on the inside. I haven't looked inside to see if it is still there, and I don't much care. My fanny pack had a few tears in it; it was definitely on its last legs anyway, but I'm still using it since I haven't found a decent alternative. It is an Everest extra large, and I haven't found anything near the size of it anywhere I've been in the last few months, so I'm hoping I can keep it limping along until I get to a place where Amazon or Ebay or some mail order place will mail to. It will probably be several months. The clear tape doesn't stick well to it, but I covered the holes anyway. When the clear tape fails (probably within days), I'll try first aid tape and see if that sticks better. If only there was duct tape here...

I bought a huge bag to put under my backpack when it is on the rack of my bike, because mud splashes up from below. I was hoping to get one big enough to put the bag in, but I don't think this one is quite big enough. Lots of Laotians pack tons of stuff into these bags and carry them on the back of their motorbikes. This one was about twelve cents at a store down the street from my hotel.

So I'll spend one more day after tonight at this hotel just healing up, then one more night, then I will take off in the morning. I have kept my wounds open for a couple of days so they will scab up, but I'll probably cover them with gauze again when I take off on my bike...I'm hoping that they will be hard enough so I don't have to peel gauze off again, but probably no such luck; they will probably liquefy a little under the bandages. Better that they stick to the bandages, though, than to my clothing. The bike is doing OK, I think, but one of the footpegs is still a little bent. Maybe I'll try to get that fixed in one of the next towns, but it is rideable.

A Mundane Extraordinary Day In Viang Xai

Today I haven't really done a lot. The big attraction in Viang Xai is the caves, and I've already seem them. But there is some cool stuff to see from wandering around the town, so I wandered some, and checked out the town. There are a lot of dirt roads, and some of them are almost as narrow as paths. I just kind of meandered for a while.

Then I went to the Indian restaurant in town to eat some great food. That is becoming my go-to place in Viang Xai. I have eaten almost all the meals I have eaten in Viang Xai there. My next stop was the pharmacy, where I replenished my supply of hydrogen peroxide. I also turned my laundry over to the hotel's laundry service to be done. This will be the first time in quite a while that my laundry has been done in a washing machine. Even when I was in my apartment in Hanoi, I didn't use the washing machine much, because I had so little laundry, I just washed it in the sink as I usually do when travelling. Before I could wash stuff, I needed to first take off my bandages, so I could take a shower, so I could put my dirty clothes that I have worn for several days in the wash. And I did that yesterday, and changed clothes after the shower, so I was ready for laundry.

I also extended my hotel stay to a total of a week, so I can sit here and recover for a bit. Unfortunately I only have a month visa in Laos, so that cuts out some time, but I think I might be able to extend it for one more month if I need to.

I also did some preliminary cleaning of my mud-caked gear today. I took it outside and scraped as much dry mud as I could off of everything that was muddy, next I need to wash it. But with all the gauze on my hands, that is going to be difficult. So I changed the gauze on my hands again and will let the wounds air out for the rest of the day.

Then I got back to the hotel and was sitting on a bench outside my room (where wi-fi is available), checking some stuff online. Then I sat there studying Vietnamese from my flash cards. A Vietnamese guy staying at the hotel saw what I was doing, and saw me struggling with the pronunciations of the words and phrases, so he sat down next to me to help me with correct pronunciation. That was a great interaction with somebody that I could barely communicate with; he spoke no English, and I speak only a minimal amount of Vietnamese.

You might say it was a pretty mundane day. But it is extraordinary because I'm in fucking Laos.

Caves and Wound Care

Today I went in the late morning walking around the town of Viang Xai, and I stopped at an Indian restaurant in the center of town to grab a bite to eat. There I met a French guy named Quentin and a German woman named Lotta, and they told me they were going to the Viang Xai caves in the afternoon. I was talking to Quentin about my accident. He had been in a motorcycle accident just a couple of weeks before himself, only he had his girlfriend on the bike with him. His scabs were much more healed up than mine were. It turned out that Quentin and I were staying at the same hotel. He was supposed to check out, but needed to defer so he could see the caves. I told him he could keep his stuff in my room if he wanted, but the guy who ran the hotel was OK with him just staying in the room a little longer, so he didn't need to.

I had wanted to see the caves, which were where the Laotian government stayed underground while the US was bombing the crap out of Laos. But I was planning to spend most of the day on wound care for the injuries that I sustained in my motorcycle accident. I decided to defer that to the late afternoon and evening, and went along with them to the caves.

We met a little before one in the afternoon to go to the visitor center for the caves. There are only tours for the caves at 9 in the morning and 1 in the afternoon, and we took the one o'clock tour. You can only go into the caves with a tour guide, but if you are not around for one of the tour times, you can get a private guide during the day for a little more. The tour was 60,000 kip for foreigners; Laotians get a cheaper price. The caves were far apart so the tour offered people bicycles for rent, but the tour guide had a motorbike, so Quentin and I asked if we could go back to our hotel and just get our motorbikes. The guide said that would be no problem. Quentin offered to take Lotta on his motorbike; I would have offered, but I could barely grip the handlebars with my had injuries. Lotta was a little reticent to ride with two guys who had just wrecked their bikes, but she finally agreed to do that rather than rent a bicycle.

The caves were amazing. They were natural caves that had been expanded with blasting, and there were all kinds of structures constructed in them for the government to operate. The tour was three hours long, and we went through many different cave systems.

Quentin was a chiropractor in France, and wanted to travel around the world for a while before going back to work. He said he could work almost anywhere if he wanted. He told me that the wounds in my palms would heal better and faster if I dug the gravel out of my palms. He had had to do that himself when he wrecked his bike. That did not sound like fun at all.

Lotta headed back to her hostel after the tour, and Quentin was taking off for Sam Nuea, which is maybe an hour or so away. I headed back to the hotel to do the wound care that I had put off until the end of the day. It was excrutiating getting the blood-soaked gauze off of each wound slowly. I soaked the wounds in saline solution that I made from taking about a teaspoon of salt from the Indian restaurant, and the gauze was coming off about a half a millimeter at a time. It took quite a long time to get it off. I also was able to take the first shower I had taken since the wreck (but there was no hot water so it moderately sucked...I only washed from the shoulders down) after I got the bandages off, so I was able to change clothes also, and get ready to hopefully do some laundry tomorrow.

Then I wanted to let the wounds air out for a while before I put new gauze on them. I put some peroxide on them, and then let them air out for a while. I also got out my pocketknife and started digging some of the gravel out of my palms. Nope, that was no fun at all. Then I put new bandages on after a couple of hours of letting the wounds air out. It was a successful mission in wound care, though I might still have some gravel I need to work on still in my hands.