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After little more than 2 weeks of beautiful cycling in Lao, yesterday we crossed our third international boundary, which in Southeast Asia are coming quite frequently in these smaller countries (3 countries in 5 weeks opposed to China for 3 months).  Several people had told us how terrible the dirt road is in Cambodia coming from Lao, naturally leading to growing apprehension, but we were thoroughly pleased to find a brand new paved 2 lane highway built by the Chinese that was just completed last July 2007, as foretold to us several days ago by a very experienced middle-aged Swiss bicycle touring couple, Mr. and Mrs. Karl Gunthard, whom we met on the road.  It is the same road with the same name (Hwy 13) as in Lao, only newer, in better condition, and even less traffic than Lao which we thought would be impossible.  Excellent.

 

From here we are planning to spend about 1.5 weeks heading south to Phnom Phen, the capital of Cambodia, where we will spend some time with Celina, one of my Maryknoll friends who has been doing mission work there for 2 years.  She has graciously found a host family with enough space for us.  I’m looking forward to learning more about this country by seeing the needs and responses of various organizations through Celina and her friends’ extended experience here.  Since we were unable to visit our German friend, Kathrin, in Vientiane Lao, due to route and timing, this will be our first visit to an old friend since Kevin and Kaishan’s wedding in Guangzhou and Hong Kong back in Nov 2007. 

On Jan. 30, we had the pleasure of meeting Yuske, a 24 year old Japanese man in Pakse town, Lao, who is also cycling far – Tokyo, Japan to Australia. 

He had planned to leave that afternoon when we arrived, but after talking with Nakia (who lived in Japan for 3 years) and having lunch with us, he decided to stay the night in a Guesthouse with us – good choice.  The next day, Yuske decided instead of going straight to Thailand, to join us first to Cambodia and then on to

Bangkok.  Yuske also enjoys music, especially blues, and is also carrying a guitar on his bike!  He is the first cyclist we’ve met who is also carrying a guitar (though we did meet a middle-aged Chinese man with a saxophone).  We jammed together at our guesthouse that afternoon and have played several times since.  Our common songs are House of the Rising Sun and a blues riff in E.  Nakia has also been a great student and has learned the Japanese lyrics for one of Yuske’s favorite songs.

Because of Lao’s beautiful natural environment, clear skies, and sparse population, we’ve been camping more and more.  In fact, we hit a new record last night with 4 consecutive camping nights.  Unlike in

Vietnam’s dense populated countryside, Lao’s countryside even right off the main north-south Hwy 13 that we’ve been on for the past week is very sparsely populated making it easy to find secluded camp sites. 

However, after meeting Gael and Elena last night (biking from France to Beijing and then back to France – www.common-life.org), we’ll try asking people if we can camp in their yards to increase our interaction.  Gael and Elena told us that most of their time in

Cambodia, if they tried to camp away from people’s houses, the people would come out and invite them to camp right in their yards anyway.  Indeed last night, the one house of neighbors came out to our site smiling and talking to us in Khmer (the Cambodian language) even though we didn’t understand, and re-started our dieing fire by putting on all the big logs we had for quite a large fire, we think, to keep away what few mosquitoes there were, and possibly to keep away evil spirits (according to Gael and Elena’s understanding).  See the post below, “Gael and Elena”for more info on their incredible journey. 

 

Something that has surprised us is how dry Lao and northern

Cambodia are.  I was expecting jungle, and although our first 150km in Lao from Vietnam on Hwy 8 had plenty of old growth forest, it wasn’t humid and soon gave way to younger forest and cleared areas reminding me a bit of Kenya’s semi-arid landscape east of Nairobi, seemingly parched by the dry season’s powerful sun.  After crossing the border yesterday, the

Cambodia side has many small brush fires burning in the forest for no apparent reason as there is no agriculture there.  Much of the forest along the brand new 2007 Chinese-built highway has been cut down and now has patchy fires, perhaps to clean the forest floor and hopefully not simply slash and burn. 

The benefits are that mosquitoes have been kept to a minimum and it’s been easy to find dry wood and start camp fires. 

FYI: Lao is Laos.  For some reason, English has added an “s” to the local and therefore actual name of the country, perhaps analogous to Vietnamese boiling down “

America” to “Mee.”  Conversely “Vietnam” in English is the same as in Vietnamese minus the space between the two words,

Viet Nam.  How about calling every country by its real name in its local language? 

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 7th, 2008 at 2:01 am and is filed under Pete's Posts, Group Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.