A Chronicle of Amy and Sean's World Travels

Hog Tales – Motorbiking the Bolaven Plateau, Day Two: Welcome to the Jungle.

You know where you are
You’re in the jungle, baby
You’re going to die

– Welcome to the Jungle, Guns’n’Roses

Day two of motorbiking the Bolaven Plateau started off innocently enough.  For breakfast, we did as the Laotians do and had a bowl of steaming Lao noodle soup. After stopping by for a quick cup of coffee at Koffie’s place, we set off under blue skies and white fluffy clouds.  We intended to head to Sekong, a town on the outer edge of the plateau, and had to head down a dirt road to get there.  Koffie and an American expat living in Lao cautioned us before we left that the dirt road to Sekong and Attapeu, another town, wasn’t great.  We figured we would be okay if we took it slow; we had heard of troubles during the rainy season, but there were no rain clouds in sight this time of year.

Shortly after we left Paksong proper, we spotted a dirt road to the right, where our map indicated the road to Sekong and Attapeu should be.  There were no signs that we could see.  We paused briefly, but ultimately shrugged and forged ahead.  The dirt road seemed to be in good condition, and we sailed along past coffee plantations on either side.  If it wasn’t for the large trucks flying by, spraying clouds of dirt, life would have been good, right up until we hit the road work.  Who knew dirt roads have road work?  The first segment of the dirt road was wide but completely torn apart.  I felt like we were back home in Pennsylvania, where the road work never ends.   Because the Laotians didn’t actually feel the need to close the road while they were working on it, everyone drove their scooters and trucks where ever the large steamrollers working on the road weren’t, which might be the flat, dusty parts on the sides, or might be the rubble in the middle.  Hmmmm…maybe this isn’t such a good idea.

To top it off, we still weren’t really sure we were on the right road.  No one mentioned road work.  Efforts to ascertain that we were indeed headed in the right direction produced less than certainty.  Anytime we saw a person, we pulled over to ask if this was the road to Attapeu.  Many times, the person smiled and looked confused, giving us our first indication that no one around spoke English, and we were probably once again butchering the only word they might have otherwise recognized in our complete inability to pronounce names of towns.  A few seemed to nod yes and point where we were pointing, but you never can really be sure.  Hmmmm…hope we are on the right road.

One thing was for sure, however.  The tourists we kept seeing the day before on the way to Paksong were nowhere to be found today.  Kids playing alongside piles of coffee beans drying in the sun stopped in their tracks to give us big, huge smiles and loud, happy sabaidees.  Their mothers, donned in traditional Laotian skirts, looked up to see what all of the fuss was about.  Even though we were covered almost from head to toe to ward off the chill in the air and the dirt sprays, everyone knew we were foreigners from a mile away.

The roadwork finally ended, but then the potholes began.  After dodging the craters, we thought we were home free when we came upon the village that was supposed to be the halfway point between Paksong and the end of the dirt road.  We stopped at a roadside stall and had – you guessed it – Lao noodle soup for lunch.  If you’re counting, that makes our third soup meal in a row.  Delicious.  Before we ate, I wiped my face and hands with a wet wipe.  The wipe came away an opaque orangish-brown.  I mentioned something about being dirty to our host, while Sean kicked me and whispered, they’re covered in this dust all of the time! It was true.  With their houses, restaurants and workplaces mere feet away, getting dirty was unavoidable.  Our meal was accompanied by the lovely screech of Lao music.  Sharing with us the pineapple being passed around the family, the one guy in town who spoke some English explained everyone else in town was at the wedding ceremony.  I wish we could have solved the eternal mystery of why Asians only enjoy music blaring out of loudspeakers at top volume, but I couldn’t figure out a polite way to inquire about this.  Alas, another time.

Unfortunately, the semi-English speaker disappeared after lunch, making it quite difficult to inquire whether there was a toilet we might use before setting off.  After exhausting every possible word I could think of to convey bathroom and only getting blank stares, I cursed myself for not learning more Lao.  Who ever thinks they’ll actually need the suggested phrases in guidebooks and translators like where is the bathroom or those drugs are not mine, officer? I was racking my brain trying to figure out how one would convey going to the bathroom in Charades without being culturally offensive, when someone finally figured out what we needed and showed us to the shed out back where the hole in the ground was located.

Waving good-bye, we set off again.  A ways from town, the road turned soft, made of fine, rusty terra cotta dirt.  We passed a local couple on a motorbike, and I noticed Sean noticing them right before we toppled over.  We hit a divot in the road and landed with a big thud.  Even though I landed intertwined with Sean and the bike, I only had a small scrape on my knee.  Sean, on the other hand, was a bit more scraped up, but nothing a few band-aids couldn’t fix.  I gave thanks to our foresight in wearing long pants and sleeves.  Even though the soft dirt was our nemesis, it also broke our fall.  As we wiped everything down in vain, two women came around the bend and toppled in the spot where we just fell.  Great; now we’re going to cause a scooter pile-up.  Luckily, they drove away unharmed.

We took off again, rather shakily.  I had to turn away from the road; I was certain we were going to fall again at every hole and every rut, Sean was certain I was going to make us fall again at every hole and every rut with my squirmings.  I tried to concentrate on anything else but the road: the fluffy clouds, the dense greenery, the occasional house.  But then we both saw the worst thing we could have seen in the entire world at that moment: a fork in the road.  Hmmm…that’s funny.  There are no turns on this map.  I thought it was supposed to be a straight shot?

We crossed our fingers and picked left, since the dirt on the road to the right seemed different than the road we were on.  I’ll spare you the suspense; we picked wrong.  Or maybe it didn’t even matter at that point, because it was quite possible that any number of slight diversions from the dirt road we ignored in blissful ignorance (lalalalala, I don’t see you!) could have a road we were supposed to take.  As we figured out much, much later when we ran into a group of travelers at dinner who traversed the dirt road in the opposite direction, it DID appear to be a straight shot coming from Attapeu.  From Paksong, not so much.  Going in the opposite direction, everything appeared to be in a straight line for hours, with an occasional road joining the way, whereas in our direction, there were ever-so-slight options.

At the time, we decided we were too far from town to turn around.  We kept driving onward, deeper into the what was increasingly looking like a jungle.  There were no kids calling sabaidee now, just an occasional scooter whipping by and thick tropical greenery on all sides.  I entertained the possibility this was where we’d meet our demise when we came to the end of the road.  We’d probably been driving for two hours since we left the village where we ate lunch.  At the end of the road, we were greeted by two Lao men in military uniforms.  Their knowledge of English was only good enough to point over the hills and far away towards Attapeu.  Turning away, we came to the realization that we had no idea where we where, and we had no other choice other than to turn around and retrace our steps back to Paksong if we didn’t want to be enveloped by nightfall in the jungle.  So for two very long hours, we headed back, dejected, to the village at the half-way point, itself over two hours from Paksong.

Naturally, as a fait accompli, we wiped out again, this time trying to avoid a ridge in the soft dirt.  We had spectators this time around; a family of 12 or so came out to the road to see what was going on.  What was going on wasn’t pretty.  Sean’s arm and the bike’s kickstand got the brunt of the fall.  The arm was bleeding; the kickstand was wedged in such a way that the gears could not be shifted.  I was resigning myself to having to walk miles and miles or moving in with this Laotian family when the husband and father came over to help us.  He didn’t speak a word of English, but he knew exactly what the problem was and how to fix it.  He laid down in the dirt and tried kicking at the kickstand, but couldn’t get enough force with his short legs and bare feet.  Sean gave it a whack and we all smiled when the bike actually started.  Considering there hardly was anyone around in these parts, we are eternally thankful that this kind man happened to live near by.

The four or five hours back were some of the longest of my life.  We both were frustrated, fearful and occasionally blinded for minutes at a time thanks to the dust kicked up by the larger vehicles on the road.  Pulling into Paksong, caked in the rusty dirt, we both breathed sighs of relief when we saw the paved road.

And just think: we had at least two more days of driving ahead of us.  Whose idea was this, anyway?

Lao noodle soup: the breakfast of champions. And lunch. And dinner.

Roadwork, even in Laos.

Faced with two by fours and views of the creek below, Sean goes it alone. We've never met a Lao bridge we've trusted with the weight of two, even though the Laotians have no qualms about driving huge construction vehicles and zipping scooters over them.

On the way to the bathroom at lunch, I had to step over these little guys.

Laotian nuptials.

When you arrive at a fork in the road, take it.

Shortly after crash two.

Next on Hog Tales: I’ve got the fever, and the only prescription is more cowbell!

One Response to “Hog Tales – Motorbiking the Bolaven Plateau, Day Two: Welcome to the Jungle.”

  1. Mike Lenzen says:

    Glad you guys didn’t get hurt up too bad after a few spills, sure is nice to get both the good and the bad about in your Hog Tales saga.

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