We took the night bus from Louang Prabang back down to Vientiane. What took us 27 hours of riding time took the bus about ten hours to drive. We re-traced the many windy switchbacks and steep ascents and descents in an all-out thunderstorm. Dave and I were in the first row of seats and had a perfect view of windshield wipers that did nothing, the driver standing up to wipe the fog from the inside of the windshield, and once, while briefly dozing off, we awoke in time to see the bus skidding through a herd of cattle on the road while blaring the horn and locking up the brakes. I very much dislike riding on a bus.

The next morning we enjoyed coffee and pastries in Vientiane before riding to the Buddha Park, built by a guy who was into Hinduism and Buddhism and created some sort of following that worshiped both. Weird place, it was, with concrete images of all these gods and goddesses plopped down willy-nilly around a grassy park.

Then we rode across the border to Thailand, where we bought tickets for the night train to Bangkok. Second-class sleepers were sold out (the best deal, we’ve been told) so we bought first-class sleepers for 2500 Baht, about US$80, total. Wee! We ate and read our books and waited for the train. The cars were nice and our cabin had two bunks and a sink and included a/c.

We got on board and settled in with our books, when an official looking man came and said the train would be delayed a couple of hours because of a crash. The wait ended up being longer, but we didn’t care. Someone came by and made up our beds for us and we were so tired from not sleeping on the bus the night before that we went right to sleep. It was a cozy, long rest! We got into Bangkok several hours after schedule, but we didn’t care.

One day and night here in Bangkok has been spent boxing our bikes, re-packing things to leave in storage and things to take to Koh Tao. And tonight we catch the night bus to Chumphon and then a catamaran to Koh Tao. We’ll be there, diving and snorkeling, for 9 days. Then we come back and fly home. Just like that our Southeast Asia bike tour is finished and we’re almost home.

Today we hired a longboat with three other young tourists to go up-river to the Pak Ou Caves. Hiring a boat can be a real pain here, since there are many boat drivers all along the river, each promising to be “the” boat to the caves, each with their own pricing and some with their own scam.

We were told by our driver that it would cost 300,000 kip for Dave and I to hire the boat to the caves on our own. We knew from our guest house host and much talking to boatmen that there was also a regular 8 a.m. morning ferry that cost 60,000 per person. We told our boatman that we wanted to wait and find some other tourists to split the cost. The boats can hold probably a dozen people, so that only made sense. We went down to look at the river and take pictures, and soon the driver came down, all excited, saying he got three other tourists to go and the boat is leaving now! We thought that was great, but then he said the price would be 100,000 kip each. You can see where this is going. After some haggling, we got our price down to 80,000 kip each. A few minutes later the three other tourists said the boatman had told them not to say anything about what they paid, which was 80,000. They felt bad and had even prompted the cut in price by saying we should all go elsewhere. After hammering out a deal, we finally left to go up river.

First we stopped at a village known for making Lao whiskey. They’ve got bottles for sale which also include snakes, bugs and lizards. Apparently, if you drink from these you will consume the power of the creatures. Here’s an easy-to-follow Lao whiskey recipe:

Then came the caves. We landed at the base, where stairs lead up to the entrance.

These caves are considered holy, and inside you can see thousands of little Buddha statues brought by locals over the years. Many are in the Louang Prabang style, with long, extended arms and curled up robes.

The upper cave is totally dark, with a few more Buddhas and a holy water trough to wash the Buddhas. On the stairs leading to the upper cave there are little village kids from across the river trying to sell small rocks and bits of candy. Others have tiny birds in just-as-tiny bamboo cages. They shake them in front of you and say, “Set bird free for only one dollar.” The poor little birds have probably been doing this routine every day since they were stolen from their nest. I will not miss scenes like this when I return home.

Today we slept in and still felt dead tired when we got up. Our bodies know that the cycling is over and they want some recovery time. Our room has satellite TV and air conditioning, so we enjoyed catching up on the political news in the U.S. on CNN and even (gasp) watched a movie. And still, my quads were stiff and felt like big weights to carry around when we finally went out.

We went first to see Wat Xieng Thong, which is supposed to be the most stunning wat in town. By the time we got ourselves out it was mid-day, so it was almost too bright to look at the outside of the beautiful buildings, let alone endure the heat. We’ve grown accustomed to the heat for biking, but walking is another story. You don’t get a built-in breeze while you’re walking around.

The wat is built in a different style than others we’ve seen down south, with less of the gaudiness and more subtle earth tones with gold highlights. We read that the roofs swoop down lower in the Louang Prabang style, and it does look elegant.

After lunch we went to the Royal Palace Museum. It was formerly the palace of the King and Queen, built by the French during colonial times. Much has been left as it was when they lived there (they were killed off by the communist government in a cave prison after the revolution, but that’s another story). There is one room with gifts from different countries to the Royal family. There are beautiful and ornate gifts from around the world. In the glass case with gifts from the U.S. there are blocky plaques, a pen set, and a plastic model of the Apollo space craft. No pictures were allowed inside, so we can’t show you any of the many hundreds of little Buddha statues they’ve collected from around the country.

The new wat on the Palace Museum grounds.

81 km

We had a long, fast descent soon after leaving the guest house this morning. We flew downhill for about 22 kilometers to the river bottom, then turned up the other side and climbed back to almost the same elevation. Again, the grade was mostly 5%, only getting as steep as 10% here and there as the terrain required. So we just got down to a rhythm and focused on the scenery and saying “Sabaidee!” to the kids as we slowly putted through small hill tribe villages of Hmong people.

The village at the bottom of our descent.

We thought we’d be cruising downhill all the way to town, but we still had some good riding to do for the last 20 km of the day, and Dave got a flat and we had to stop while he fixed it. We’ve had quite a few flats on this trip between his bike and mine. Most of the causes were glass on the road, as it was in this case, and some of the tires held up better than others. We’ll be writing more tire reviews when we get back.

We found a great little guest house just behind the main road near the night market. It’s across the street from a guest house listed in the Lonely Planet Laos and as we have found before it offers more for less. There are so many backpackers who will go straight to LP-listed guest houses and pay whatever they ask without looking around at alternatives. Often, those nearby will cost less or offer more for the same, and the owners are more attentive and happy for your business.

75 km

We started the day with a thousand-meter climb up a mostly 5% grade, so it was slow and steady for a while. Then it was up and down for several kilometers following the ridge line. We rode straight through Muang Phu Khun, another usual stop on this route, because a cyclist we met this morning called it a “hole” and a pair of cyclists whose touring account we read called it the worst guest house in Southeast Asia. This was only possible (for me, at least) because we got a good head start by continuing past Kasi yesterday to stay at the hot springs.

While these high-altitude, extremely steep mountains are beautiful to ride through, we have been shocked to see the extent of the slash-and-burn farming that has scarred much of the mountainside visible in all directions from the highway. There is little original forest left. Farmers clear and burn large patches of forest, farm the land for a couple of years until it is no longer fertile and then they abandon it to burn new patches. All along the ride each day we have seen scooters parked on the side of the road and farmers hacking away at crops and tiling soil above and below the highway. We wonder how much of the clear-cut we see has been done for logging and how much for farming, because we don’t see any access roads for bringing out the timber.

The dark patches are only the most recently cleared areas. The smoother green patches are abandoned farm patches that have grown in with scrub. There is little forest left to be seen.

There were two guest houses in Kiewkacham, both offering rooms with shared bath (squat toilet & bucket shower stalls). One was clearly a brothel for the many truck drivers stopping here (on the left), and the other was a little better. It was terribly dirty, but we were glad we were still carrying our own sheet. There was no fan, but the night was cool enough at that altitude that we didn’t need it, especially since it had rained.

78 km

Between Vang Vieng and Louang Prabang lies the hardest cycling of our trip. We knew from research and talking with other cyclists that we’d be climbing and descending a few thousand meters over these days and that the riding should be beautiful with green mountains, fresh air and quiet roads.

Now down to the last three days of cycling, I felt refocused and ready to enjoy every bit of it. The scenery was spectacular all day as we cycled up through limestone cliffs. We had some nice cloud cover to keep things slightly cooler.

We only had one moderate climb in the middle of the ride and then again at the end to get to Bor Nam Oom, little more than a guest house and restaurant built at a hot spring. We heard about this place from Damian and Judy, two cyclists we met in Krabi, Thailand, and this was a real gem to find out about (thanks, you guys!). It is 20 kilometers past Kasi, the usual first overnight stop on this route.

The view from our bungalow porch

The hot spring is not much more than a small stream to sit in, as the pool they built a couple of years ago does not hold much more than a few slimy inches of water, but we did sit and enjoy the warm stream after a chilling rain storm. Flowers filled the hillside garden around the bungalows and the mountains were jutting up all around, so we really enjoyed the view from our small porch. The restaurant offered plenty of vegetarian options and the women there were smiling and friendly. This was a real treat compared to the usual small-town guest house along the highway.

Vang Vieng is like a town plopped down in the middle of Laos from some other country. You don’t really feel like you’re in Laos. The small town itself is mostly made up of accommodation, restaurants, and tour companies for the pleasure of tourists. This is the place you may have heard of where most of the restaurants play DVDs of “Friends” all day and night, with pillowed wicker platforms where you can lie or sit watching TV all day while drinking and eating. This weirdness really is true. We didn’t participate, though when we did go out to eat (mostly Indian food) we could sometimes hear as many as four different episodes of the sitcom around us.

Another oddity of Vang Vieng is the popularity of inner-tubing down the river. You pay 40,000 Kip and get a big inner tube and a tuk-tuk ride up the river a few kilometers and dropped off. You can simply tube down the mostly tranquil river or there are several river-side bars set up along the way, with volleyball and different kinds of trapeze swings into the river.

We decided to give it a go, and it was hilariously fun even without getting drunk like most all of the “kids” out there (and safer). We didn’t bring the camera, of course, but I do regret not having a picture of Dave climbing up the bamboo platforms and swinging way out over the river and jumping in. He was great! We even played a bit of volleyball. But we soon left the party scene and drifted quietly down the river to town. It was a really great way to enjoy the beauty of the mountains and forest around us.

32 km

This morning we woke up early to the sound of a storm gathering. We sat on our balcony with our fruit and yogurt and Nalgene of Nescafe mixed up strong (it’s better than the sickeningly sweet Lao coffee and we’ve become quite used to it). It started to sprinkle rain, and as locals fished the river below it started raining harder. Soon the wind was whipping through the coconut trees and the rain became a total wall of water. We sat enthralled for a couple of hours, talking and watching the river rise and the clouds change.

After all these hot, dry months the rain has finally come and we are enjoying every drop. The temperature has fallen by maybe twenty degrees Fahrenheit and it’s almost chilly.

After the rains cleared up we headed out to ride 13 kilometers north of town to see a set of caves. Just after kilometer marker 169 there’s a big sign on the left for the caves. We followed the gravel road down to the river and parked our bikes (3,000 Kip each) and crossed the river on a bamboo footbridge (5,000 Kip each) and walked to the first cave, Tham Sang, or Elephant Cave. Inside is a stalactite shaped like an elephant, helped a bit by some concrete we think. It also featured a Buddha footprint (do they think that we think that Buddha actually stomped his foot here?) and a Buddha statue. It’s considered a holy cave, so you have to take off your shoes at the entrance.

Next came a short walk to Tham Hoi, a 3-kilometer long cave that leads to an underground lake. A local boy of about 16 pointed out the way and walked with us. He chatted with a couple of boys at the entrance who sold us our tickets (5,000 kip each) and then walked in with us. We had pretty good head lamps with us and he had a powerful flashlight, so we could see really well. After walking a few minutes, we had to wade through some water. The local kid said it was fun, we should keep going, so we did.

The cave stayed about the same width and height and remained pretty level as we walked through, but parts were filled with water so that soon we had to swim. The local was having great fun and we were glad to have someone to follow in. I personally wouldn’t have swam through if he hadn’t been there. I couldn’t believe how far into this cave we were going! After a while the local said he was turning around, indicating his flashlight battery wouldn’t last. So we went back with him. It was weird to emerge into the humid warmth of the jungle outside when we came out. I could imagine the locals spend a good amount of time in there during the hottest parts of the year.

We then walked up the hill a bit to the large cavern of Tham Loup, which was not very deep. After that we walked around to Tham Nam, a cave through which a tributary of the Nam Song flows. To go into it you pay your entrance fee (10,000 Kip) which includes a tractor inner tube. You get on the tube and pull yourself on a rope into the cave. Shortly after the water deepens and you use your arms to paddle up the stream. When you reach the end, you simply float or paddle back down. It was a fun way to see the cave and a really unique experience.

All along the local boy is guiding us. We reviewed our guidebook and it said an admission fee “is collected by a guide at the entrance to each cave,” so we assume he’s included as part of the fees we’re paying at each cave. He’s been fun and helpful, so we get out some money for a tip before we walk back, thinking we’ll give it to him as we part ways at the village where we crossed the foot bridge. But before we get back to the village he stops, turns, and says something like, “OK, you pay me money now for the guiding,” with a completely serious face. I had the tip in my hand at that point and sort of held it out, shocked at the abrupt change from his fun manner. He looked at the Lao money and shook his head, saying, “Five dollars. Each.”

Dave said, “No, that’s not the way it works. If you wanted a set amount you should have said in the beginning.” He then took the money and tried to hand it to the boy, asking him to please take it. The boy refused. So we started walking back. The boy then said, “OK, five dollars!” We kept walking. Then, finally, he asked for the Kip and we gave it to him.

We walked back feeling bad about the whole thing, thinking about how we could have handled it differently in the beginning. To give in to the boy would only encourage him to do the same thing to others, and we felt it was wrong.

91 km

We had a flat, speedy start to the day today. The weather is definitely starting to cool as we enter the rainy season, and it makes a huge difference in how we enjoy the cycling and the stops we make along the way. Instead of sweating before we even got going in the morning, we actually started the first few kilometers feeling refreshed, with high clouds filtering the sun’s rays. At 4, 6, and 24 kilometers into the ride today we saw additional guest houses that might interest other riders on this route.

The last 20 km or so were hilly as we approached green-coated limestone cliffs jutting up out of the Nam Song river valley ahead of us. We found a beautiful room at the Mountain Riverview Guest House right on the river, sold by the view from the second-storey balcony. The air is hazy from the smoke of so much slash-and-burning the local farmers have been doing, but the mountains still look amazing.

We went straight out to eat, finding we had three Indian food options, as well as many others appealing to Westerners (falang is the local term for foreigners used by locals). We feel OK with eating like typical backpackers when in touristy towns because in between all we eat is local food.

74 km

Since we now have less than a week of riding left on this bike tour, I find I’m thinking and planning beyond this trip as I ride. I don’t want to miss the beauty of each kilometer, but I must say I’m definitely feeling ready to move on.

This section between Vientiane and Louang Prabang is a classic cycling route that several cyclists we’ve met have told us was their favorite in Southeast Asia. I find I’m struggling to keep my mind focused on the present. This is always something I find difficult, but it is silly to be thinking of future moments when I’m here right now. I just need to re-fucus now after spending a couple of days in Vientiane, a city where you can easily insulate yourself from some of the daily frustrations of being a tourist, a mini-vacation from your vacation in a sense.

The ride today was easy but interesting, with a few rolling hills here and there near the end of the day. As we approached Phon Hong there were a couple of decent-looking guest houses on the left, but we rode a few km farther and stayed at the junction with the road that leads to the Plain of Jars. There was only one guest house here and we took it, though it could have been cleaner. I’d probably recommend one of the places on the southern outskirts instead.