Laos Stories

The engine roars and a fountain of sand disperses from the back wheel as my Honda Baja speeds into the Mekong. Water sprays in all directions and soaks my pants before the front wheel hits the plank and shoots up onto the raft. The rear wheel however jerks to the right just a moment before I reach the top and slides off sideways. Instinctively I pull the clutch and the front wheel break hard. With my legs already on the platform I try to support the not insignificant weight of the bike to keep it from falling off the raft and me with it, but it’s too heavy.:

“Oh great!” I’m thinking. Here I am standing now in the mid-day heat with my paralyzed iron-donkey on some more or less deserted trail in the middle of a secondary forest, miles away from the village, not having met a single soul for the last twenty minutes.

All of my three years residency in Chiang Rai, Thailand, have been spent as a visa runner. It was the easiest option; get up one day every month, drive the eighty kilometres to Mae Sai, walk across the border, buy a few pirate CDs and DVDs, get another exemption stamp in the pass port and go home; doing the fortnight’s shopping at Big C on the way.

After one week in the south of Laos we left Don Khong with our big open pickup truck to Pakse to take there the VIP night bus to Vientiane.

For me it was more than 7 years ago that I was last in the country of the thousand elephants, the visa-runs to Vientiane not included. For one who has never been there first a small impression of this country that is land-locked by China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Burma.

When you walk towards the Mekong from central Vientiane at night you eventually cross Setthathirath Road, the last street before Fa Ngoum Road that runs along the river front. The river, the beautiful river, which the Lao claim that if you watch for long enough you will see the bodies of all your enemies drift by.