Hurrah!
We made it home without any broken bones. It has to be said that it definately comes as a relief to me. In the last month especially I was desperate not to have any kind of arse meeting road incident. I was in free fall mode, I wanted everything to be easy for us for the final bit, to hell with it – “let’s go crazy, let’s go mad, let’s spend more than 4 quid on a nights accomodation”.
We had definately had enough of rubbish roads by the eighth month of riding. We only had a couple of days dodgy riding in the last month. They were both in Laos. Infact our first major ride into Laos was pretty kak.
The road in to Laos from the northernmost Thai – Laos border consisted of “bull dust” (imagine very fine saw dust ranging from 3 inches to a foot thick) that made it very hard to see exactly how big the rocks that your tyres are bouncing all over are, to freshly wetted mud (the roads are hard packed dirt and are regularly watered by an oversized watering can – in the shape of a large water sprinkler truck). After this first day of rubbish road we had tarmac…..ahhhh wonderful tarmac.
Laos is a wonderful country – it holds the sad record of being the most bombed country in the world. More bombs rained down on Laos than all the bombs dropped by all sides of the 2nd world war, mostly to rid Vietnam of the start of the Ho Chi Minh trail, thanks to Nixon, Johnson and Kennedy.
There is good feel to Laos, it’s governed losely by communist values but communism does not travel down to the man on the street. It’s kind of seen as a “method of administering the government” and not so much a way of living or philosphy. With Cambodia there was an hidden undercurrent sadness in the people that had been pushed down and squashed by the Khymer Rouge and other crap governments. No so in Laos. Poor yes, happy yes, communist – kind of but not really.
After Laos we screamed it down back to Bangkok and put the bike on a boat to Denmark. It’s going to take a month to get here apparently. Then we had about a week from here to spend about 3 days on an Island called Ko Wai – very quiet and very pretty. After this we got a bus back to Bangkok and checked into a nice posh hotel for our last 2 days on holiday. Jolly nice it was to, quite different from the last 9 months accomodation.
It’s a very different experience to come home this time. I don’t feel that my wings have been clipped like last time, more that they are about to get fluffed up in anticipation of new adventures. So thanks for reading, I hope it’s been of some amusement.
Brian and Fie xx