Day 2: March 6th
Day 2 drive: Vang Vieng to Phoukoun
After enjoying breakfast by the riverside, we were ready to hit the road. Alex drove out of the parking lot, Denali drove out, and I…sat on my bike and listened to a disheartening whirring sound when I tried to rev the engine.
Bike repairs, day 2.
We walked up the road for a water bottle of gas. No luck. We walked to the closest mechanic and brought back a boy who looked about 15, and concluded that I needed a new battery. After a long wait in the parking lot, and several trips back and forth to the shop, we were moving…3 hours after we expected.
Rice paddy green: there’s nothing quite like it.
The delay was forgotten as soon as we were on the road. The next hour, between Vang Vieng and Kasi, was my favorite part of the trip. The distinctive Vang Vieng mountains were still in sight, and the road curved and winded in a leisurely manner, making the driving easy enough to fully enjoy the brilliance of the rice paddies and the wow-factor of the backdrop. In Kasi, we stopped for sodas and to dip our feet in a nearby stream, where a group of boys were playing–throwing one another in the water and climbing up trees to plunge into the deceptively deep water below. They giggled and said falang a few times when we sat down, then continued their shenanigans.
Once we left Kasi, the road began to get steeper and more treacherous, and the peril of stalling out on a steep uphill curve became more real. The bike I’m used to driving can groan along in 4th gear at any speed if I force it to. But on the motorcycle, the tell-tale, panic-inducing, clunk-clunk-about-to-stop engine sound began as soon as I didn’t shift down fast enough. The only thing worse than getting stuck behind a slow-moving truck going up a steep hill was when I actually stalled out uphill, and starting again without rolling backwards or getting demolished by the next truck coming around the blind curve was a challenge.
Time to try a rolling start. (photo credit: Denali)
Alex’s bike stopped on one such hill, and after several tries, it appeared it was not going to start again at all. Luckily, we were just around the bend from a small, mountain-top village, and we rolled our bikes into town. As soon as we came into sight, more and more people came out of houses, out of the fields, and into the street, to stare at the strange foreigners. Before long, we were surrounded by a circle of wary but curious children, who stared at us like we had arrived from another planet. We were able to communicate with one of the women, who told us that the closest mechanic was either in Kasi, where we had come from, or Phoukoun, the next town–both about 45 minutes away. As we deliberated about what to do, the wide eyes of the village children continued to follow our every move, but they were a little unsure about all of our attempts to make friends. Ngaam lai, very beautiful, I said to one little 5 year-old, pointing at her necklace. She looked skeptical. Denali made a bit more progress with the help of a digital camera, but there were still no smiles to be had. Finally, we discovered that with a little pushing downhill, Alex’s bike could start while in motion, and we cautiously made our way out of the village.
Where did these falang on motorcycles come from? (Photo credit: Denali)
After that second delay, it became clear that our original plan was entirely unrealistic. There was no way we would make it to Phonsavane that day. We would be lucky just to make it to Phoukoun by dark, so we reluctantly scaled back our plans just to get to Luang Prabang by the end. Just before Phoukoun, we had been told something about bungalows to stay in…which we soon discovered was actually a place called Bangalow, a village just bigger than the one we had stopped in. It looked similar, with staring children, roosters, and thatched roof houses, but also with a large truck-stop style hotel that seemed wildly out of place. The view of the mountains from the back porch won us over, so we settled in to enjoy a peaceful sunset on the mountain top at the end of day two.
This looks like the perfect place to stop for the night.