After Thakhek I was ready to head into Vietnam, but the border-crossing buses don’t go from Thakhek, you have to backtrack south a few hours to the 2nd largest city in Laos, Savannakhet. After doing some research I found someone who recommended a good one day motorbike loop from Savannakhet, so that was all the convincing I needed to stay two nights in the town. It was a 3 hour minibus trip, only two people in our bus, plus a pit stop for our driver to buy fresh mangos at a roadside market that also sold snakes in a bag, bbq rodents, and dead animals in large glass jars filled with liquid. Yummy. The mangos were actually really good though, they like them partially unripe, so they’re a little soft in the middle and crunchy at the edges. The driver gave me a mango and his knife to cut my own on the way. Top notch service!
The driver said I could pay an extra $2 to get dropped off directly at my guesthouse instead of the bus station, so sure. I checked into a family run guesthouse and the teenage son showed me to the room, then wandered off. All of these Loatian cities kind of have a similar feel, they’re all on the Mekong, they all have some colonial French buildings, they’re all kind of boring, and they all have a night market which is the most popular place to visit in the evenings. Being the largest of the southern cities, Savannakhet had the most old French buildings and the biggest and most diverse night market, which I suppose makes it the best! They had a few interesting things like Turkish style kebabs and grilled eggplant, Japanese mochi, and Korean fried chicken and corn dogs. It’s worth noting with the explosion of Kpop in the last few years, everything Korean is very trendy now.
I rented a bike from my guesthouse, and they gave me a beater. But seeing how Savannakhet gets very few tourists, there’s not many places to rent bikes, so I figured I would make do. The loop was all paved road anyway. So I set off around 11am, 15 minutes later I’m in the countryside. But this damn bike is running high RPMS at cruising speed. I was shocked at how fast it was using up gas and had to stop at a roadside stall to buy a liter of gasoline. When I tried to start the bike up again, nothing. Agghgh. Tried for 5 minutes, using the kickstart, nothing. Someone came over to help to see if they could get it going, nope. I asked where the mechanic was and fortunately there was one a few minutes down the road. The nice thing about Southeast Asia is that if you’re anywhere near civilization, no matter how small the village, there is always a mechanic nearby. Always.
It was about 10 minutes, sweating my ass off in the sun, and I actually passed a guy who asked me what was up, in unmistakably American English, and he walked with me to the mechanic to help translate. This guy had lived and worked most of his life in California but came back to Laos to retire and build a house in the countryside. Not a bad plan. After failing to get the bike to start again, the mechanic unscrewed the middle plastic housing and began looking around inside. Verdict: Bad air filter and bad spark plug. He brushed the air filter and replaced the spark plug and 15 minutes later I was on my way after paying the invoice, $2. Crazy. Although the bike seemed to be running even rougher than before. But I just started and hell if I’m going to just turn around already.
In this part of Laos the land is very flat and the scenery uninspiring, and there’s nothing overly exciting for tourists to see, but there were a few mildly interesting spots on this loop. My first stop was at a shady forest temple called Wat Phoukor, which was a nice respite from the sun, as most of the countryside doesn’t have many big trees. The temple grounds have many scenes from local folklore, including figurines depicting what happens in Buddhist hell. I didn’t even know there was Buddhist hell! Pretty gruesome!
Riding further on, there’s a lake and monkey forest, but all the monkeys seem to just hang out in the parking lot, not in the actual forest. There’s also spot called Taleo old temple, which was designed like a church, but isn’t a church, and was in use as a monastic school until 1969 when it got heavily damaged by American bombing campaigns. It’s still standing today, but in bad shape. The closer you look, the more you see the scars from the Vietnam war. Apparently the locals know where to find old, unexploded cluster bombs, but people are more educated about them now and where the danger areas are. But still a handful of people die every year from them, usually children. Of the 270 million cluster bombs dropped on Laos, they say 30% never exploded. That’s a pretty insane number, almost 100 MILLION little bombs just sitting around somewhere in the country.
While I was driving I noticed my gas gauge drop pretty quickly, but I thought there was no friggen way I could have burned through almost a whole tank in an hour. No way. Normally a full tank lasts you all day. I was on a country road, so I’d investigate in the next village. A minute later the needle dropped all the way down and I came sputtering to halt. God damn it. Piece of shit bike. Back to walking it on the side of the road. Very fortunately (again!) a place with gas was only a few minutes away to fill her up and it was only a short delay that could have easily been much worse. Back on the road I was soon at the highlight of the loop, the oldest library in Laos, built on wooden stilts over the river. Very impressive! No tourists around or anything, just a few monks hanging out and some local kids running around.
There was also a turtle pond and crocodile marsh to see, but you had to go a bit out of the way to get there, and with my lack of trust in my bike, I decided against it. Which was good, because the bike was getting worse, and as soon as I made it within the city limits of Savannakhet, the piece of crap died again! Now I’m pretty pissed off. 3rd time the bike has died. Although once again, it was just a few blocks walk to find another mechanic. Same deal, he opened it up, took a look, bad spark plug. He removed it and handed it to me to touch, burning hot! Ow! Thanks for that Mr. Mechanic! So another new spark plug. Another big bill from the auto shop. A bit more expensive this time, $2.25. Big city prices.
I finally got back to the guesthouse well after dark and let them know what I thought of this bike they gave me. Karen mode. I was pretty (very) annoyed they gave me such a shit bike, and I was very very lucky it died in all the right spots. I didn’t have to pay for the bike rental, but I still ended up paying more in gas and mechanics than I would have paid on a normal day of renting a bike + buying a full tank on a bike that isn’t garbage. Although the actual dollar amounts are trivial of course. I guess it’s pretty fitting though, you can’t have a trip to Laos with at least some bike trouble! Well that concludes the brief two week excursion into South/Central Laos. Being that I’m poor-ish this year, I didn’t want to travel too long, my plan was to get over to Danang in Vietnam to play some more poker. Although the bus from Savannahket goes to a city two hours north of Danang called Hue, the former capital of Vietnam. So that’s where I’d go first. Two more nights before the poker restarts.
The next morning it was off on a big old bus from the 70’s or 80’s. I was the only foreigner on the bus. The border crossing was actually surprisingly stressful because the driver doesn’t speak English and nobody tells you anything! There’s a no man’s land that you have to walk across, and then once you get through the Vietnam side, there’s no bus anywhere to be seen. Uhhh. What. I’m trying to ask people and they just point to the exit gate. Okaaayyyy, weird. You almost always wait for your bus in the immigration area.
So now I’m fully in Vietnam, and all the locals waiting on the Vietnam side are trying to get me in a taxi or minvan to the nearest town, Dong Hoi. No, no, no. Thankfully someone actually helpful tells me to go down the road and wait at the gas station for my bus. I ended up waiting there 30 minutes, wondering if my bus and luggage were gone, never to be seen again. But eventually it arrived and it was smooth sailing until Hue. Although we sat in rush our traffic, driving through the city, and they wouldn’t let you off the bus in town! You had to wait until the bus station, outside of town on the exact opposite side of the city. And then sit in traffic again taking a taxi back into main part of the city. AGHHGHG. But now we’re in Hue!