Bolaven Plateau Mini Loop — The road liss traveled

So as I mentioned earlier, I already did the full 5 day, 350 km loop over a decade ago, but this time it’ll be only a two day, one night mini loop, a different route which is the more popular one these days. 200km in total, so nothing too crazy. It was raining in the morning, so I waited a bit to head off. Most of first day isn’t particularly exciting, the hotspots are some coffee farms to stop by and have a fresh local brew, and perhaps do a coffee tour if you’re so inclined. I’ve been on enough of those. My way of keeping things interesting was taking a detour off the main highway on the side roads. Doing this in Vietnam for example, was most likely to be worth it because the side roads are usually good and paved. Laos, not so much!

Not much to take photos of. Here’s a house

This part of the Laos countryside was pretty unexciting, dirt roads, lots of rocks, lots of potholes, very slow going! Which is fine, I don’t mind a bit of a slow bumpy ride, as long as there’s something to see. But honestly there wasn’t much of anything to look at, mostly flat scrubby land, some dirt fields, a few houses here and there. And then the drizzling started, making that top layer of dirt a claylike mud. Which was okay at first, and got progressively worse as the drizzle kept up.

Still okay, but getting worse. This is where I put my camera away

These red dirt roads feel a little different than just riding through normal dirt/mud, where the whole ground is permeated with water. It’s like a firm hardpack where the underlying earth doesn’t absorb the water, leaving the slick mud mixture to form a layer sitting on top. Kind of like how driving on an all gravel road feels pretty stable, but if it’s a layer of gravel sitting on top of asphalt, it’s much more slippery and dangerous. But I had made it just fine, very cautiously, almost slipping out a few time, but not. I thought I was in the clear, just two miles from the highway, when the road got really really bad, basically just one huge mudslick.

It’s exhausting riding! You need super precise throttle control to keep your momentum going, but just barely, not too fast. And you have to have a 100% straight line, because if you turn the wheel at all you’re sliding out. And even then you might still slide out. It’s easy to drop the bike, because your feet have no traction when you put them down to stabilize yourself. I’m not exactly a mud riding pro though, so I’m sure the locals would make this look a lot easier. They also have dirtbikes. Although I did watch some big trucks come by, and even these huge heavy trucks could not properly grip this road. I mean they were moving forward, but you could see them slip sliding, side to side, kinda like a tailfin. Yikes. At some spots I got a bit stuck and tried to walk the bike, but you literally couldn’t move because you can’t get any traction with normal gym shoes. Zero. It’s like ice. If the incline was more than 2% you’d just slide right back down. No choice but to get back on the bike and grind it out.

Eventually I did make it back to the highway, relieved, exhausted, but hey I made it and didn’t drop the bike at all. Of course my shoes, socks, legs were covered in mud, plus random splatters everywhere else. So that detour was definitely in the ‘not worth it’ department. Oh well. Even though it was still drizzling, it was like a dream being back on the pavement. Soon enough the rain stopped and I made it to the first major stop of the tour, the Tad Lo waterfall. Pretty impressive during rainy season! A lot of people like to spend the night here to enjoy the small village and the falls, but my way to enjoy the falls is by swimming in them, and with the weather being cool, misty, and cloudy, I decided to just stop for lunch and then keep moving on.

I ended up further down the road in a bigger village that has a few spots for foreigners to sleep at. I somewhat randomly chose a homestay, which had maybe 4 very basic rooms. There were two couples staying there, a French/Brazilian couple, and a French couple. Seriously like 80% of white tourists in Laos are French. They seem to have an affinity for former French colonies. Although most of them seem disappointed that none of the locals can speak any French and they have to use English haha.

It was run by a pretty interesting guy, a former farmer (basically everyone in the village is a farmer) and recently converted Christian (almost half the village is Christian now) who not only owns this homestay, but a farm as well, so he was certainly reasonably well-off compared to most villagers. But his hosting graces were not exactly polished because he kept bitching about how much he spent building the rooms and the western toilet/bathroom and leveling out the road, and how Covid screwed him, and he wasn’t getting enough tourists to recover the building costs. And how lucky us tourists were that we could just drive around wherever we liked, spending cheap Laos currency. Which is true of course, and it is nice! But having your host basically bitching at you right from the start, while you just kind of sit there and nod your head, isn’t exactly the type of hospitality most tourists are hoping for! The coffee was good though.

Fancy pants family with a tractor AND a truck

From the homestay we stopped by his brother’s place next door where he was cooking, cow brain among other things. Not bad. Soft tofu-like texture. Very spicy! Then he took me on a 30 minute walk around the village, which was pretty fun, because it was mostly him pointing at houses, and saying either good things or bad things about the families that lived there, if they were lazy or hard workers, and pointing out if they used shoddy building materials or not, or if they could afford a truck or tractor. Apparently the popular thing in the last few years is people using these big tobacco bongs, and getting hooked on them, bringing them out to field to work, making people lazy etc. Nobody wants to work anymore! Well except the good Christian families.

For religion, most of the village still had their traditional animist beliefs, and many of the local traditions and celebrations sounded quite fascinating dealing with all the ghosts and spirits to keep happy, or to keep away. But he was saying the problem was that if anything good happens to someone, it’s because they’ve been blessed by the spirits, but if something bad happens to someone, it’s because they’ve been cursed by them. So it doesn’t have to do with hard work or personal responsibility. And then if you have issues you don’t work on it yourself, you go to the local Shaman who figures out a course of action to drive away these bad spirits or bring the good spirits back to fix your problem or bad luck or whatever.

Of course the action often involves some sort of animal sacrifice, chickens for small problems, pigs for bigger problems, water buffalo for the biggest problems. If you have developed a serious health condition, do you go to the hospital an hour away? Nope! Sacrifice a water buffalo! The water buffalos cost about $1,000, which is around half (or more) of a farmers yearly salary. So people end up spending all their money on these silly Shamans who don’t actually do anything. He said he knew a guy who was a heavy drinker that had stomach swelling, feet swelling, couldn’t walk etc (presumably cirrhosis) and spent his whole life savings sacrificing buffalo (and not stopping drinking) and obviously it didn’t fix anything and now he has to beg for painkillers. So yeah, I could see how this traditional belief system could be a real problem. Growing up around modern medicine, you can take it for granted, I learned this especially in Africa, but witch doctors are still alive and well in many parts of the developing world!

The weather cleared up in the late afternoon and I took the scooter out to explore my surroundings for sunset. It was a good one! So far in rainy season it seems like most days the sun just sets quietly behind a layer of clouds at the horizon. But tonight it was finally clear on the horizon and there were some nice pinks and purples in the sky afterwards.

I got back for the big group dinner, some good home-cooking, with most things involving two of Laos’s favorite ingredients, chili peppers and basil, accompanied by sticky rice of course. So that was nice. And we got the whole run down of why the animists are all dum-dums and everyone needs to start believing in the Lord Our Savior!

This wasn’t our dinner, but this was the brother cooking a cow brain dish (somewhat of a delicacy). Tasted alright!

The next morning we had a nice pancake, bananas, and nutella breakfast and I was off on my way. I did another little detour loop to get some views from higher up, with paved roads and all, which was worth it this time! Nice winding roads with the fog rising up from the valley floor, and then snaking back down to the highway. On the way towards Pakse there are a bunch of waterfalls to check out, although the fog eventually turned into another midday drizzle, which was a bit of a bummer. I waited it out in various coffee plantation cafes along the way. Here’s some photos of the most popular waterfalls, they’re quite similar, both being dual falls. I remembered them now from 14 years ago, and the weather was the exact same, cloudy and misty!

Later on the afternoon the clouds cleared eventually and I did finally get my chance to have a somewhat sunny, swim-able waterfall. It was in a pretty weird location, at an abandoned resort hotel. I wouldn’t have known to go around the locked front gates if I didn’t read it online. This waterfall only had a handful of google reviews. Some old man materializes out of nowhere to collect 50 cents to park your bike and points out the concrete walkway to get down to the water. I almost had the place to myself, just one instagram couple there doing their quick little photoshoot and leaving. This is what is so cool about southern Laos, you’ve got this objectively stunning waterfall, and it’s mostly untouched by people! It was the weekend too! I liked this one much more than the two previously posted waterfalls where all the tourists stop. This was a good way to finish up the mini loop and start heading back to Pakse. Tomorrow morning would be off to Thakhek to do the increasingly popular Thakhek loop!