This story has a happy ending.
What a fantastic start to the day. Up early and through the countryside:
… for breakfast at the coffee plantation. Good food, good company, lovely atmosphere. A less exciting, but equally pleasurable, highlight of my trip:
I felt it happen. A loud pop, and the back tyre felt wrong. I slowed and we inspected the damage. Puncture. Completely flat tyre.
We’d arrived at Paksong and decided to detour to the waterfall 16km away. It was a decent road. Well, for about 10km, then it started to look suspiciously like a track. We talked. Learning from our experience yesterday, we turned back. Less than 2km later, we were stood by the bike.
All part of the adventure, we thought. Things like this just make the trip more interesting. A local pointed to the garage up the road, but it was too far to push the bike – I don’t know much about vehicles, one thing I do know is that direct pressure on the wheel arch is something to be avoided. So we pushed it across the road to the man’s home. He inspected the damage. A bolt was to blame. A pretty big one at that. Not surprising it totally blew the inner tube. And, luckily, it was just the inner tube. Not great, then, but a fairly simple fix.
Or so we thought.
Finding the right size inner tube was the first problem. Charades at the shop just up the road revealed that they had inner tubes, but the wrong size.
The man signaled we could go further up and get one. He suggested we push the bike. No. He signaled for me to get on the back of his bike. No chance, I thought. Risk is fine, but I don’t put myself in unnecessary danger. There was no reason for me to join him. He understood our gestures and went himself.
He returned empty-handed.
Pants, we’d need to get to Paksong. He then wanted us to push the bike to Paksong. No!! We indicated we’d pay him to go. He conferred with his son. On the piece of paper he handed me, he’d neatly written “100,000K”. Four times the going rate for repairing a puncture. But he knew, and we knew, we didn’t have much choice. And it wasn’t extortionate (c. 16GBP). We shook on it.
Half an hour later, we finally had an inner tube that fitted. We were feeling OK at this point as the end was in sight. A nice little anecdote for the dinner table.
As an aside, the younger man was busy building/repairing what appeared to be a machine to process grains:
Health and safety consisted of a pair of glasses that he occasionally wore when using the angle grinder. He was actually building it from spare parts and bits of metal. And doing a pretty good job as far as I could tell. It struck us how resourceful and skilled many of these people are, and their culture of mending and getting on with things is something our throw-away society can learn from.
As another aside, and continuing my unofficial review of toilet facilities in Asia, when I asked to use the toilet, the woman climbed some stairs at the back of the shop (the back part of which, of course, was her home) and returned with a long tube of material. She was looking a little sheepish as she gestured round the side of the house:
Not even bucket flush, and exposed to the world. The average Laotian lives on $1.25 per day. Nice comfortable statistic. I obviously understand what this means. Today I experienced what this means. It means you live hand-to-mouth, it means you repair everything because you can’t afford to buy a new one, and it means that you go to the toilet in the open air with a makeshift skirt to protect your dignity. That’s what it means.
Meanwhile, we’d hit another hurdle in our quest to get moving again. The nut had been fastened too tight for him to undo by hand. Two trips later, he still couldn’t remove it. The local garage was closed and nobody could find the owner. We had to make it clear again that the bike couldn’t be pushed anywhere. A puncture is one thing, a damaged wheel is quite another. I wasn’t going to let them make the problem worse. Calling the rental company, the man was more interested in who was going to pay for the fix. We were more concerned about the fact that we were stuck miles from English speakers with no means of transport. He didn’t get the message.
So, I signaled to the man’s cart and twenty minutes (and much hand gesturing later), the bike was loaded on to make the short journey to someone who had a hydraulic machine.
The nut finally came off. But we’d chosen an automatic bike, and they only have manual ones. So there ensued more chattering as they worked out how to remove the tyre. Out came the piece of paper again, and the man signaled that I should pay the mechanic 100,000K. I tried to indicate that we were happy to pay a bit more given the hassle. Typing on his phone, he showed it to me. It said “200,000”.
Oh, no no, this wasn’t on. Palms down, shaking from side to side, I indicated that this was out of the question. The mechanic’s wife showed me a 20,000K note. That was more like it. I agreed. This wasn’t exciting anymore, it was stressful – we just wanted to get back safely. And before dark. We’d lost loads of time, so we agreed that, as our main priority was our safety, we’d drive slowly back to the hotel. Waterfalls could wait for another day. We’d also become the main attraction in town. Anyone would drove past was given an account of proceedings in Lao and they hung around to join in the fun. We were consciously trying to project an upbeat attitude, but inside it was actually quite intimidating having some many locals and just us two westerners. Finally, three hours after the puncture, we were back on our way.
Little did we know that things were only going to get worse.
He hadn’t quite inflated the tyre enough. We found a garage in Paksong and pulled over. Gesturing our requirement, the mechanic got out the air machine… and promptly started removing air from the tyres. Argh! His next attempt involved a toolkit and he started to trying to take off the tyre. Noooo! By this time we’d drawn quite a crowd again. I created a tube with my right hand, put it to my lips and starting huffing and puffing into it. Everyone burst out laughing, but we’d finally explained what we needed and they enthusiastically obliged. As the mechanic was inflating the tyres, one of the guys said, quite clearly, “Alcohol”. Oh blimey, I though, he wants paying in beer. Beer being in short supply, I got out my purse and pulled out two 2,000K notes. Another man grabbed them from me, stuffed one into the hand of the mechanic… and pushed the other back into my hand. “Enough, enough”, he said. And then the first man repeated, “Alcohol.” Then we twigged – they wanted us to spend the evening drinking with them. Oh my! Politely declining their kind offer, we went on our way.
I tried to notice the amazing views:
And then it started raining. Not only did we get wet, it meant sunset would be earlier. After a brief stop (it pours, but only for about 15 – 30 minutes usually, we continued driving slowly back to Pakse. And then we hit the mud. I saw the bumps ahead, and the started raising myself off the seat.
Next thing I knew, I was lying on the floor with the bike on top of me. And my leg hurt. “You OK?” I asked urgently.
“Yes, I think so. You?”
I sat by the side of the road. It wasn’t broken, but the pain was masking my ability to accurately assess it. So we sat in the mud in the rain. And felt surprisingly calm. We’d agreed a max speed of 30kph and Karin had already braked when she saw the mud so we’d only been going about 20kph when we fell. In yet another sign of the kindness of the people, many locals stopped to see if we were OK. As the pain and shock subsided, I tried to stand. I’d live. I wouldn’t know until tomorrow, when my body had had chance to react, what the deal was, but for now the main aim was to just get back.
Night had fallen, so we continued in the dark. I noticed that Karin kept braking and accelerating, which obviously increasing the chances of an accident. Turned out that her glasses were causing a glare from the oncoming lights and blinding her. I could also tell that she was pretty shaken from the fall, so offered to take over driving.
It was pitch black when we got to the outskirts of Pakse and its welcome street lights. And then we realised that we had no idea whereabouts in Pakse our hotel was.
My lack of sense of direction is legendary but, eventually, by logic and deduction we pulled up very tentatively outside our hotel. Ordeal over. No waterfalls, but we’d made it back in one piece. Just. But the bike was a mess.
We decided that we’d deal with it another day – today was officially over.
