July 8th, 2015
What a disaster!
I should start off by saying no one was hurt. So no need for that kind of concern. But I’m sitting here on my patio, it’s 5:36pm and I’m sweating bullets waiting to see how much it is going to cost me to get my passport back.
We did rent bikes this morning and headed off for the day with such excitement and promise. It was going wonderfully, in fact I had just told Troy that I wanted to rememeber everything about today bcz it was the best day ever! We had been riding for about 2.5 hours and we had stopped out by the Kuang Si waterfalls for our lunch break. Here are a couple pix, me eating my favourite sandwich, so thoughtfully purchased before we headed out. And a selfie from RIGHT before we headed up the lane. DON’T I LOOK HAPPY???????
We ate our sandwiches, had some water, then we make the decision to go up a dirt road that pretty quickly ended up being a just a garbage laden goat trail that ran along a small creek (this part is important). We were less than 100 metres up this path when I decided to call it off, we should turn back, I figured it was a no go. So we start to turn our bikes around, I can’t even believe this happened, other than it did, I lost control going like no miles an hour, I was just doing a U turn and I drove the bike straight into the creek. So YA, that happened. It wasn’t deep and there wasn’t much of a current so not dangerous at all, it was maybe 8-10 inches? Not sure, Troy took a picture which of course I don’t have at this time. Anyway, the two of us dragged the bike out of the creek and tried to start it, but it wouldn’t start. Of course not, the thing is full of water. So we have to walk it back down to the road and we tried everything. It is an automatic so we couldn’t roll start it, even though we tried that. We couldn’t kick start it despite many attempts. So what do you do…..you start pushing. Accepting our fate, hoping a tuk tuk would drive by with room for me and the bike. I pushed prolly about one km and along came a tuk tuk, he stops and the driver assures me he can get the bike in. He will charge me 80,000 kip ($10- worth every penny at this point). He starts the process and the customers in the back stop him and say “no”, he says, “really, it’s ok”, they say “no” so he says sorry to me, puts the tailgate up and has to drive away, not one of the girls looked back at me. I BET NOT! Close to 100 degrees in the blazing sun 23 km from town and they couldn’t look me in the eye. I’ll keep quiet about their nationality. Oh well, that is ok, I’ll perservere.
Another tuk tuk stops in another km or so. Full of strapping young to middle age french guys, very eager to help, everyone of them spent several minutes trying to kick start it. To no avail, but no room in their tuk tuk even if they wanted to have us get in. Ok, so I keep walking/pushing and every so often, coasting, if there was a Downhill. We make it to a small village, 4km from where I started, and stop at a “service station” I use this term loosely. They spoken no English and they simply thought I needed gas. I am sure everyone who passed me thought I was a stupid foreigner who had run out of gas in the middle of nowhere. Little did they know I had almost a full tank. So no help from the service station. By now the battery is dead from trying to start it so many times. So my options are really limited. We keep walking. Troy sees a tuk tuk and he flags it down for me. It is full of some young very kind European backpackers. The fellow in the group tries really really hard to kick start it. Nothing…..so they are happy to have us hijack their ride, they all squished to one side of the tuk tuk and the bike took the other side. I rode in the front with the driver. So a 4km walk of shame plus a 20 km ride of shame. It’s been a long weird day. Now the part that concerns me of course is the fact that you have to turn over your passport to rent a bike here. So to get it back I am pretty much at their mercy. I’m hoping that the bike miraculously dries out and the battery regenerates enough for it to start before the guy who dropped it off comes back to get it. If not then I have heard horror stories about these sorts of these things. It happens everywhere is SE Asia, they hold your passport ransom until you pay, they just bring more guys over if you look like you want to get scrappy about it. Hoping it goes ok and I didn’t just buy an overpriced crappy used scooter in Laos that I won’t be able to do anything with….
I’ll keep you posted.
