LAOS DAY 1: lost on a one-geared bike

Our first day in Laos, we tried to ride 35 km to see a waterfall and ended up completely lost in the countryside. Our first problem was that we were too cheap to rent the mountain bikes for $12, so we rented the one-geared city cruisers for $5. Although I would have made all the hipsters of Santa Cruz proud, riding with one gear through the Lao countryside is not very effective: we had to walk our bikes up every single hill. Plus it rained continuously for the first hour. At one point, I thought that Laurel was going to stage a mutiny.

After about three hours, we weren't exactly sure how many far we had gone or where we were, so we started asking locals about a waterfall. The ladies in the gas station laughed at us and told us that it was up a steep hill made of chicken poop. Then, one smart-looking man in a truck told us to take the next right and that it was just 11 more kilometers down that road. When we got to that intersection, there was in fact a giant sign for a waterfall, so we turned down the unpaved, soaking, muddy road. We kept pushing our one-geared mechanisms up the road through the sludge and slush, and we kept walking up every hill.

After another hour of riding over the "chicken poop" road, we asked for directions again and no one had any idea about a waterfall. Then one girl said that she knew of a waterfall that was 100 kilometers further down that road! So starving and hopeless, we tried to catch a ride back to the city. At first we tried with these men who were loading a logging truck (an interesting turn in my relationship with logging trucks from last summer), but they were kind of dismissive. A few minutes later a young guy with a small empty pick-up came and we flashed him some cash and he threw our bikes in the back, put us in the cab, and drove us back to Luang Prabang.

We never reached our goal and our bikes were worthless, but the land we cycled through was amazing. The road was enveloped by hills of green lushness that, from certain vistas, rolled on for miles. At intervals between the jungle-covered hills were pristine rice patties, which are always so romantic to Westerners. When we weren't riding through dramatic slices of nature, we were in the middle of rural villages and all the half-naked children would come and wave at us and say, "Sabadee!" (My tansliteration of Lao for "hi!")