Here I am, on the shores of the Mekong again (I love this river) for what could be the last time I see it on this trip and I bring to you the last tale of Central Asia, that fateful day when we all finally met, then split, then met again and finally rode into China.
The day started peacefully in that ghastly place where we were staying. It didn’t feel like a place to stay in bed long so I woke up not too late and went to the cybercafe. No, there was no internet at the hotel, what did you expect? Also, when I tried to buy a SIM card for the remaining day, I was told there was no 3G today and should come back tomorrow. Most of us had finished the work to do on our bikes the day before except for Richard who needed welding after his ordeal on that mountain road the previous day.
Little by little, most of us set off. Lorraine the first as she allegedly was the slowest, then Neil, Chris and I. David and Lyn had camped somewhere outside the city so we didn’t see them in the morning and Robin and Keely (still hadn’t met them) had already announced in one of their barking emails that they wouldn’t be coming to Naryn. We left in no rush but not so late that we wouldn’t be able to visit Tash Rabat, the famed last supply town in the Silk Road. The last place where travelers could stock up on water and food before the high passes and the fierce Taklamakan desert. The road was beautiful. On a high plain, surrounded by absolutely stunning mountain ranges of beautiful colors.
Golden mountains on the rightMining towns on the left Until we took the little winding road to the left and ended up in another, completely different, beautiful valley and arrived to Tash Rabat where there was a gathering of bikers. Iain was there, Lorraine was there and Robin and Keely. Finally, I had met the last part of the group. It was a weird meeting because for a long time I had really wanted to meet them (Robin had been the one who had steered me away from another group and convinced me to join this merry band of travelers in a very cool email he sent me a long time ago) but for the last month they had been either disappeared or churning out very weird emails bordering on aggressive. While everyone chatted about the next day, Lorraine told me that the little yurt on the prairie behind us made a hell of a soup and so I decided to try it. It was very good.
Meeting in Tash RabatAnd then went on to visit that big rock pile that people come to visit here. The caravanserai of old where merchants and other travelers rested before the harsh journey ahead.
That big rock pile people come to visitI should remember that sometimes it is useful to have humans in the picture for comparison. That thing is huge, to get and idea, the small green thingies by the entrance are trash bins.
After a while we had all visited the caravanserai and decided to set off. There was talk of camping but I must have missed a part of the conversation because even before arriving to the main road, Keely, Robin and Iain had left us without me even noticing. Also, on this road was last time I have shown my finger to anyone on the road (and I have vowed not to do it ever again). This local car overtook us all and for some reason was matching our speed whenever we slowed down or accelerated keeping a constant supply of dirt in our eyes and windpipes. I got tired and overtook him, thinking he would surely understand why I had done it but no, he accelerated and overtook me, throwing again all the dust in my face. It was then that I deployed the deadliest weapon I carry on the bike, my left middle finger. Despite all the dirt he must have seen it because he promptly stopped, got off his car and started gesturing for me to stop and fight him, which I didn’t of course but got very scared that he would chase me all the way to the border and shoot me. It was then that I decided that I will keep the finger to myself in the future.
He didn’t chase after me and pretty soon we arrived to the Kyrgyz checkpoint. It’s the start of the border area, you are not allowed in without a Chinese visa but it’s still about 70km from the actual border. The Lonely Planet said there was very basic accommodation at the border but this only looked like barracks so we pressed on. The road was nice but it was getting late and we still hadn’t found the said « hotels » and camping at that altitude was a big no-no. Just when my hope of finding anything was about to die, we spotted Richard on the road, he hadn’t come to Tash Rabat because he had left later than us but he arrived first. The « very basic » accommodation mentioned by the guidebook is the most basic place I have ever stayed so far. It wasn’t a building or a yurt, it was a wagon. Inside, the wagon was split in two « rooms », each with a sleeping surface. The one on the left could sleep 4 and the one on the right, 6. On the same sleeping surface. I can’t call that a bed, it was simply a hard surface with a bedcover. We piled up our stuff in the 4 people room, decided that Lorraine would sleep on the floor with my Thermarest and left the other room to the 2 truckers of unclear sexual orientation that were already there.
To be sure, it was really cheap compared to what we had been paying in Kyrgyzstan and they provided a very nice dinner in the other wagon.
Dinner at the wagon The next day, while we were waking up and getting ready, the missing ones arrived and David started trying to start the car. David and Lyn had slept in their car as they usually do when they are given the option. The old diesel Range Rover was having trouble with the cold, the altitude, the glow plugs and whatever else can give trouble. It was very unnerving. We were supposed to be at the border at 9 in order to be on the Chinese side early to avoid any problems and by 9:30 the car still wasn’t starting. After many deliberations, we were about to cross the border without them when it finally started and with it our Chinese adventure.
My bike’s electrical socket being used to heat the glow plugs of David’s carKyrgyz biker
Cruising through Cambodia along my favorite river ever, the Mekong, I stopped for a couple of nights in Kratie. It was going to be only one night but life by the Mekong is so peaceful that you always want to stay one more night. It turns out that in this part of the Mekong river live 75 Irrawady dolphins. Only 75 live between Kratie and the Lao border, it is an endangered species. There are more in other countries but only these in Cambodia.
Fifteen km North of Kratie is where you have to go and everybody tells you so, from to the Lonely Planet to the guesthouse manager. I am always a bit wary of this animal spotting tours/expeditions because either you don’t get to see the beast or it’s crowded with other tourists snapping photos just like you. None of that happened. Since I’m of the late-sleeper chronotype, I didn’t go at sunrise but at around 2PM, when it’s hottest. Best ever, I was almost the only tourist dolphin spotting at the time and I saw loads of them.
At first it’s a bit strange, you don’t know what to look for and the boat driver shoos you to show you where the dolphins are but of course, when you have turned in his direction and then to the direction he’s pointing at, they are gone. But then you start hearing it, when they come out to breath. The sound of them exhaling is what you should be listening for. Looking is almost useless because you don’t know where they are going to surface.
And the water comes alive with dolphins around you everywhere, they are pretty shy and don’t come close to the boat when the engine is on but the boat driver turns it of and goes on with the oar. At some point there was dolphins on either side of the boat and I didn’t know which way to look. I was in awe, it was absolutely beautiful.
Irrawady fresh water dolphinDolphinAnd I will leave you with a book recommendation: Douglas Adams and Mark Cawardines’s Last chance to see.
Oh, and they say also that Kratie has some of the most beautiful Mekong sunsets. I let you be the judge of that.
Tonight, I feast on my favorite water! After spending the day under the unforgiving Cambodian sun, I found this beauty at the local mini-mart. Really, I’ve never felt myself dehydrate so fast, not even in the Uzbek deserts and I’ve been drinking a lot of soda water for lack of proper fizzy mineral water (even that abomination called Schweppes Soda water that Schweppes dare only sell in the third world). The last country on my road where there’s been proper sparkling water was Kazakhstan.
I looked in my rear view mirror and his bike was almost on the ground. I ran back to help only to find blood flowing from his leg. Not making ourselves understood by the restaurant personnel, I ran to a table and snatched a bottle of mineral water to clean the wound.
Two days before we were taking train number 13 from Bangkok’s Hua Lamphong train station to Chiang Mai. That train is an experience in itself. Not unlike Chinese trains, in this train the cabins were not cabins but just a space where 4 beds are together. However there are curtains around each bed, which is very much welcome since they have a really strong air con and it’s freezing. I didn’t want to have to put on my winter pyjamas to sleep on the train, mainly because I don’t have winter pyjamas with me! The train ride to Chiang Mai is a worthy experience by itself with the restaurant coach being a great highlight (other highlights include the amazing landscapes you see in the morning). Cultural shock at the max. I was used to the the French TGV bar coach and didn’t expect anything similar but what I found made me laugh so hard that I ran back to my father’s berth and said to him: « Dad, we HAVE TO go eat there ». Here’s a sample.
The more I poured water on the wound, the more everything became bloodier and bloodier. Now I was really worried and we had to find a pharmacy to dress that wound before it got infected or anything. I jumped on the bike and almost left without paying for the water.
So after a nice Thai dinner and a good sleep, the train made its entry into Chiang Mai 2 hours late. We took a songthaew, which is just a fancy name for a truck with seats at the back, to Tony’s Big Bikes and collected the 2 Honda Phantoms that we were renting for the week, strapped our luggage to the back seat and we were off to the house Pimsai and her family were lending us (Thank you Pimsai!). With the great instructions her and her dad had given me, it wasn’t very hard to find. Aside from riding past the entrance a couple of times of course.
2 Phantoms in the houseWe couldn’t find the hospital they had indicated so we aimed for a pharmacy and tried to ask for antiseptic (should understand, right?) but as soon as they saw his leg, they refused to help us and the only other word we could get out of the person behind the counter was « hospital ».
After we dropped our things in the house and took a shower, we decided to go for a short ride and aimed for Mae Rim to be on our way to Chiang Dao. We rode for a bit but it was clearly past lunch time so after tentatively stopping at a market where it looked like everything was deep fried, we opted for a small eatery right after where we could get some nice noodle soup. There must be a lot of farang (that seems to be what we are called around here) in this area because they had menus in English even though they couldn’t speak it much. We ate, we drank and we jumped back on the bikes. I started and when he was turning around his bike, it stalled. The bike stopped sharply and the steering was turned. The next thing in order is that the bike is on the ground but he made a rookie mistake: he tried to prevent it from falling. Never do that, you’ll get hurt is the consensus among bikers: the sharp foot peg dug deeply into his leg.
Pharmacy after pharmacy turned us down and their English was always so weak that they couldn’t properly explain where the hospital was. Finally, we ended up in a pharmacy that was close enough to a hospital and the English level of the attendant permitted her to explain it and us to understand it. He got 7 stitches and a little paper in Thai explaining what he should do every day (clean the wound at any other hospital).
During the whole search for the hospital my mind wandered along many different lines, imagining what we could do of our stay in Chiang Mai if he couldn’t/wouldn’t ride anymore. None of that happened and we had an excellent week riding around Chiang Mai taking in the beautiful scenery: the mountains, the jungle, the little roads, the roadside temples, the roadside restaurants and even the elephant camp of Mae Sa where I got to ride an elephant. Yay!
I rode an elephant!PS: I will post the first GoPro videos I made during this week as soon as I get a decent connection. Just a little teaser: since I didn’t have my helmet with me and I didn’t want to waste the sticky mounts that the GoPro comes with, I improvised a wrist mount for the camera using my all-purpose neck roll and a strap. 😀
« I really don’t know why it is that all of us are so committed to the sea, except I think it’s because in addition to the fact that the sea changes, and the light changes, and ships change, it’s because we all came from the sea. And it is an interesting biological fact that all of us have, in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea – whether it is to sail or to watch it – we are going back from whence we came. »
John F. Kennedy
And here I am, by the sea, without want or urge to leave. I know there are many roads to ride and many sights to see and many things to thing(?) but the sea is so powerful that I think I will stay one more day. Or maybe not. The sun sets on the sea every day as it has done for ages here but every time is just as beautiful. So beautiful that instead of getting the camera to snap a photo, I just get into the sea to swim.
Hi! I had forgotten to upload this video I made after going up that impossible track in Charyn canyon. On the perspective of the road we did after Issyk Kul, this path doesn’t seem so bad after all…
The first time something was stolen from my bike? Kashgar, China. Some fcuker decided he needed my AirHawk more than I needed it and took it from the bike while it was parked at the hotel.
The first time a cop clearly asked for a bribe (and got it)? Bangkok, Thailand. This bastard was standing under the bridge in Phloen Chit, where Rama I becomes Sukhumvit. He took my International Driver’s Licence and wouldn’t give it back until I gave him 300 baht (7.5 euro). That was yesterday. Today, somewhere else, another cop tried it. I put first gear and went away.
This story is about what probably is the worst road I’ve ever taken but also one of the days with most riding fun so far on this trip. I’ve already mentioned this day a while ago, right after it happened, on this post.
After that rain, I didn’t want to stay by the lake anymore. The next day was probably going to be sunny but Richard had arranged with Neil, Iain and Chris to take together the dirt track to Naryn, the one I had seen on Cédric‘s map and I was thinking of taking the next day. Meeting was at 8:30 at the junction so we packed all our wet camping gear and went to meet the others. Advantages of traveling with other people there are many but one big disadvantage is that you lose sleep-time flexibility. Had I been alone, I would have slept in until my gear dried. It’s alright, the storm had sent us to bed really early so I got a lot of sleep. Lucky I did for I didn’t know it at the time but I was going to need all my energy that day.
Richard, Neil and Chris had inspected the first couple of kilometers of that road the previous day and they had found it to be appropriate, with some protruding rocks but doable. Or so they thought. Big mistake. If a road looks not too good but doable when it’s close to civilization, it will only get worse as it gets away from towns.
A beginning like this one:
If it starts like this…Will never become tarmac or anything close to it once it gets away from civilization. And it didn’t, pretty soon Richard’s bike started falling to the ground of its own accord and just to not make it feel bad, mine too. At a rocky tight corner, the V-Strom’s bash plate touched the ground and the wheels lost adherence. I stopped my bike and tried to park it somewhere safe to help him. I chose the wrong spot and now 2 bikes were on the ground. Still, we kept on. The scenery was beautiful and we were riding as a group so tight spots could be worked out or around together. Richard was having a lot of trouble with the ground clearance of his bike and nearly decided to turn back after a couple of really bad bits of « road ». The road was so bad that I announced that if he did, I would also, not only because it was very hard but also because going down through the places where we had been going up would be very dangerous and no one should be left alone there. But he didn’t turn back.
One of manyAfter a couple of rough spots, we all agreed that the ones that were ahead would stop whenever the road became very bad in order to help Richard’s bike up. Either by holding it on the sides or whatever other means necessary and as a result, whenever we saw everyone stopped somewhere (I was riding behind Richard), it was time to freak out. It was at one of those places where everyone stopped that I was waiting to go up with everyone else strategically deployed on my path to help in case of need when I saw Iain waving at me to go forward and just past him, Richard go down a cliff. He looked puzzled when I refused to move forward and got off my bike until he turned around and saw what I had seen happen.
And then it went SouthPriority shift. No more going up, better check what happened. Richard was alright, the bike seemed quite alright too but in a really bad position, you can see his helmet video here. It seemed like the bike wasn’t moving further down so Richard started unloading it while we go the rest of our bikes up through the same spot, carefully trying not to have a similar accident. I think I dropped the bike while going up but really, compared to Richard’s situation, I was alright and the guys helped me pick it up.
Once we had all our bikes up there, it was time to take the V-Strom back up. It took the five of us to bring it back up and once it was up he could assess the damage. Front fender was broken, bash plate was detached and gear lever was shot. Think, think, how to make a new gear lever?
A new gear leverBush mechanics are a lot of fun (when it works). Most of the time you need to mentally review all your gear to find something that looks like the thing you broke and see if it fits. If you are lucky, it will. As it turns out, I had seen Richard’s spark plug remover recently and it looked like a gear lever so Iain and him set to make him a new gear lever. A couple of cable ties and some duct tape later (and a ratchet strap to hold the bash plate), he was set to go.
It didn’t get easier and soon we were dropping the bikes again. Richard even more since he was getting more and more tired. We were being so slow that not very far from the high pass, a VW Camper Van caught up with us. It was a German couple, Jo and Anika, their camper van all set for long distance travel, with 4WD and independent whatever on the four wheels to go up this terrible road. From then on, they stuck to us, helping us pick up the bikes when necessary and even making tea for us when we got to the high pass!
German Camper Van couple makes tea for random strangers at the high passThe other side of the mountain was really something else. It was just as beautiful and probably just as difficult but instead of rocky outcrops (there was still some), it was time for river crossings. The first one was an easy one, the second one was a bit more difficult but Jo and Anika arrived with a portable « bridge » right after we picked up Richard’s bike but right before it was my turn to cross :D.
A portable bridgeAll in all, it was easier than the other side but our feet were wet. The river crossings were not easy but all together, sometimes holding the bikes on the sides or pushing it when stuck, I managed to cross them all without falling in the water. And then we came to a big one. I have no direct pictures of it but it was a wide, deep, fast river followed by a very steep slope. Two Italian bikers had just crossed it in the opposite direction and we chatted with them about what was ahead each way. Despite our multiple warnings, they decided to go ahead even if it was already past 5PM.
Iain crossed the river. He just went for it, got stuck in the middle but with a bit of pushing he was pretty soon up the hill on the other side and we were all just looking at him wondering if we would be able to do the same safely. It was then that some local yurt-dwellers approached us and told us that we should go around instead of straight. There was another way actually, riding through a bunch of rocks and crossing three smaller streams onto a much less steep ramp.
That was the funny moment. Richard’s bike fell on dry ground but he must have been feeling hot and he went for the water. I did cross without much trouble but the sense of achievement got me in the end and I had to drop the bike right after crossing. In the video you can see Neil proposing me a path, me getting psyched to cross and finally crossing only to drop Z on the other side.
I got up quite alright after that and, as the Italians had said, that was the last of our river crossings… but not the last of our suffering that day. It was getting darker and colder and our feet were wet but it was time to find a campsite. Even if we were at 2761m of altitude. Potluck dinner it was that night and it didn’t turn out so bad. I cooked rice as usual with cashew nuts and dried raisins but this time Richard contributed some herrings in spicy tomato sauce. Best meal ever.
The previous statement might be an exaggeration but we had been riding hard the whole day and we hadn’t had lunch, or a proper breakfast. We went to bed in the cold, dark night and cold it was. I slept inside my sleeping bag with the silk liner and the +11 degrees (NOT) liner and most of my clothes on and even like that I had a very rough night. My feet felt like they were freezing the whole night and I had to get out of the tent to pee many times but we did wake up the next morning. There was frost on our tents! -1 on a +10 sleeping bag is not for the faint of heart.
But it was a beautiful nightThe second day the road was much easier and as the altitude dropped we got under the tree line and the landscape changed radically. Also, there was bridges to cross the rivers. Not the safest bridges I’ve ever seen but they kept you dry.
Doesn’t look good but it’s functionalPretty soon (well past midday) we were in that hole they call Naryn and had checked ourselves in that hole that some called a hotel and which name I can’t remember. It would have been better to go to a guest house but we were too tired to search and we wanted a shower. The shower is also a whole other story. Some people got a shower, some people didn’t. In the end, the only ones who did get a working shower in the room were Chris and I so everyone came to our room for shower, even Jo and Anika.
Oh, I also met David and Lyn in Naryn, 2 days before entering China, there was only two other people I hadn’t met, Robin and Keely but that’s another story. We had just been in the most difficult road so far and wanted a shower and internet. We got the shower, internet not so much. Did I say Naryn was a hole. It’s also probably an exaggeration, the hotel I stayed in is probably the one to blame for that.
