Two days ago - The road from Attapeu January 12
This isn’t an infection, it’s a mucus invasion! It makes me thankful for the asian culture of long, noisy, involved spitting in public, as I can now participate with gusto.
Flowin’ flowin’ flowin’, keep that mucus flowin’, rawhide!
It’s a good thing I amuse myself…
—
It’d be two days ago now. I woke up to the sunrise, and a cacauphony of bird calls,and shortly, the blaring noise of pumpboats on the river, after a fitful nights sleep. I ate what little food I had left from the night before (a carrot and some very mushed bananas), packed up, and headed back to the village I’d just come from to see if I could get some sort of food.
I asked at the first village shop I came to if they had any food, but they pointed me to another little shop. It certainly wasn’t a restaurant, and hardly a shop - just a few hanging bunches of candy and treast and rubberbands for the kids.
I sheepishly asked the lady if she had any rice, and she immediately beamed and ran inside to get a plastic bag, which she filled with a generous amount of sticky rice from her basket. I tried to pay her, but she adamantly refused, saying it was for good luck. (Later, I man who spoke english translated that if I ever came back, I had to promise to come visit her). Later, she also gave me some boiled water to refill my bottles.
I was standing there, eating rice, when a man came up who spoke english pretty fluently. It turns out Thavone is the english teacher at the secondary school in Sanaxay. When I’d gone through Sanamxay the day before, apparently I’d talked to the headmaster of the school. (I think he was the guy I’d quizzed about directions and distances when I stoppped to buy water). Thavone said he wanted to come speak to me, but I guess by the time he found out I was there, I was already gone.
It being Friday, he was teaching english at his village’s primary school, which has no english teacher. I ran into him on his way to work. We chatted for a while, and tossed the frisbee around. I was lucky enough to make a quick photo of him alongside a very photogenic old man with about three teeth who’d been looking onthe whole time, who I’d been really wanting to take a picture of.
We eventually parted ways, as Thavone had to get to work, and I had to hit the road.
I rode back past where I’d camped, and the road soon turned away from the river. It was passable, but barely. Even a motorbike would have been difficult. Mostly it was a single foot track but sections were quite rocky. Almost the whole way I was surrounded by lush forest. Huge trees and bamboo as thick as my leg towered over my head. The few villages I passed were very poor, probably the poorest I’ve seen. It was rare to come across a bicycle, most people were walking.
At one point I stopped part way up a hill to make some adjustments to my bike and two buys came down the hill towards me on bicycles. The bikes had no pedals - just the bar the pedals used to rotate around, but that’s pretty normal to see, even in the city. But these bikes didn’t have any brakes, either. Each man had one flipflop clad foot jammed against the front tire, acting as a crude brake.