Day 63 Friday 2nd October 292 km (19300 km total)
Good-bye China, Hello Laos!
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So here it is the route travelled so far. Still two countries to go, but as I intimated yesterday, once I leave China I will be on familiar ground and so it feels like the beginning of the end for this particular adventure.
An easy last ride in China, only 500m to the border post.
The (magnificent?) 7 parked up together for the last time and we filed along to the immigration building.
Once through that rather uncelubrious exit, we would be out of china.
And there it was done - just under 2 hours to complete the exit from China, say goodbye to Abdul our guide for the past 25 days, get through Laos immigration & then say goodbye to each other and then we were on our way on Laos soil - well quite nice tarmac to be more precise.
Russ, John & I had agreed to ride to Oudomsuk together after which Russ & John would head west towards Nan & I would continue south to Luang Prabang. One of the first differences I noticed was the number of school kids on the roads and how keen they were to wave at us.
But mostly this first section was just excellent roads through lush scenery, a change was to come but I didnt know it then, so all was good with the world!
We stopped at a small hotel cafe in Oudomsuk for some proper coffee & my first pad grapao since leaving Thailand in July. Things were getting bette & better !
Final photo shot nefore we went our seperate ways ...
Russ & John apparently had good roads for the rest of their journey that day, not so for me unfortunately.
The warning signs came about 20km after we split up.
Then things started to deteriorate pretty quickly as I climbed
This was the main north to south route in Laos (about as important as the M1!) but it was evident that they had decided it needed a facelift ..
There wasnt a great deal of traffic about, but soon I came to a queue, so rode to the front to see what the issue was. Turns out they had closed the road for a while to put down a layer of rocks ....
We waited patiently for about an hour whilst a sucession of heavy lorries tipped their loads & a digger smoothed it out. Then they just waved us though....eek!
What followed was some of the hardest riding I had done, the rock layer was about 12 inches deep and hadn't been rolled or compacted, so was as stable as a bag of puppies and sending my wheels all over the place.
I tried to follow in the tracks of a heavy lorry, which worked for a while, but then pick up trucks kept coming past weaving across the road creating criss cross tracks as well.
That section lasted for a few kilometers, then it was onto "here's one I did earlier" which at least was stable and solid ...
.... But often quite sandy.
I hit another queue after an hour or so, this one kept us for another hour whilst they rolled a layer of sand onto the road ahead. I parked by a locals house & sat in the shade for a while.
Once over that section, it was good roads for a while
But the fun was to return several times again, often without warning.
Next problem I had was failing light, I still had 170km to do and it was going dark. Time to forget the camera & concentrate on seeing where I was going. The road works stopped thankfully, but that meant it was the old road - full of potholes, no fun at all when you cant see them!
The last hour and a half was in complete darkness, no street lamps & little traffic to indicate where the road went. So I had to slow right down & concentrate hard.
Eventually hit the outskirts of Luang Prabang and found my hotel, a nice little place on the river banks. More about that tomorrow.
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