People started stirring at sunrise just as I expected. We wandered out and loaded the bikes in a little muddy spot near the door. Several people watched curiously. One guy helped, which was nice. It's so much better to interact with people than just exchange stares.

It was too early for us to be hungry so we just got coffee and rolls. This was a mistake especially since we hadn't had dinner the night before. Just before we left we met a young college student who spoke surprisingly good English. He was very nice and wished us luck. I had felt a little bad for not interacting more with Lao people, so it was good to talk to someone. It was also good to see that someone from this truck stop was going to college.

We had no idea what to expect from the road that day. As the crow flies, we had only 30km to go. But the map showed a very very windy road. All we knew was that the road wasn't mud. The Chinese had built it in exchange for logging rights. Oliver had said it was a terrible road.

The first kilometer marker we saw was marked 75. We presumed that this meant it was 75km to Maung Xai, our destination. This was way further than we expected but it turned out to be a little shorter than we actually had to ride.

Seventy-five km is normally a short day for us. But that day it was long because of The Hills. We climbed and climbed and climbed. All day was overcast. We passed few villages or even people. The road cut through a mostly young forest of deciduous trees--no palms or bananas up here. Directly along the edge of the road was a thick growth of weeds and vines. Now and then we got a distant view where we could see very tall mountains behind us to the east with clouds mingling in the jagged summits. We didn't so much look down valleys as down long, U-shaped ravines.

Sometimes we could see whole bare hills below us, randomly dotted with small bamboo and thatch sheds, and mountain goat trails connecting them.

We found one of these sheds along the road and lay down in it to rest. It's basically a six-foot by five-foot elevated bamboo platform with a bamboo roof but no walls. It was one of the first times in recent memory that we stopped to rest on the road for more than a minute or two, without having anyone show up to watch. A couple of jumbos, motorcycles and one large truck passed. A white horse grazed nearby.

The road followed the hilside at a very even grade. It turned right, toward the mountain, over a steep flowing streen, and would then take a hairpin turn left back to a scenic view, then right again towards another creek. We thought over and over again that we had reached the top only to have our hopes dashed and see the road rounding another point far above us. According to my uncalibrated altimeter, we peaked at about 4,000 feet.

Once we reached 3,500 feet we started rising and falling but always rising a little more than falling.

I drank lots of water on the way up and we were running low although we had started just 15km earlier with over three liters. At the first village we passed we asked at a place that had soap and toothpaste if they had any bottled water. They didn't.

The next village, called Ban Song Cha, was well stocked. The different ethnic groups in Laos are defined by the altitude they live at, low, middle, or high. The high group are the Hmong, and we were definitely in Hmong territory. The people wore very distinctive clothing of dark and light blues, black, and sometimes red and hot pink. They don't wear sarongs; they wear baggy black pants that flare out and go only as low as the calf. Since they live in cool places they normally wear long-sleeved, somewhat thick jackets. The jacket often has a deep V neckline almost like a vest, and wide black "lapels." Most of the hats were made by wrapping thick, embroidered cloth around their heads. The hats were often fringed with small, yellow tassles hanging in back.

This is one of the few places we saw lots of people wearing traditional clothing just because that's actually what they wear everyday, not for a ceremony or a show.

We gathered the usual crowd when we laid our bikes in the dirt alongside the road in front ofa shop. We got three bottles of water. I felt thirsty, weak and exhausted. Not onlyhad we climbed over 3,000 feet, but I hadn't had much to eat in the last 24 hours.

We sat next to the road and drank ourwater and relazed as about 25 faces of men, women and children stared at us. I took the opportunity to stare back. Inoticed many children wearing silver bracelets and necklaces. The necklaces had a curvy M desgin at the end of the chian. About half the people wore the traditional dress. Others dressed like the lowland Lao with sarongs and light shirts. Some dressed in T-shirts and Nike baseball caps. Others wore a combination of all three.

We were fortunate that this group had a few ice breakers in it. A couple of old women came over and shook Joan's hand warmly, smiled a big three-tooth grin (JOAN: I didn't notice their teeth at all) and looking rather amazed that we rode those bikes all the way up there. I noticed they had heavy silver earrings that stretched their lobes to a good inch and a half long. Theyhad the most formal dress and a lot of tassles in their hats. We felt like we had been welcomed by the matriarchs.

Another woman saw my horn and kept pointing to it. I was debating if I should play. I wanted to just keep resting. But she finally pinted to herear and then the horn and then her ear again. That was a distinct request. I had to play.

I played a few tunes and didn't get much response but I didn't mind. Then a guy from the audience wanted to try. I love it when there's a guylike that. He held the horn in the most awkward position and blew hard but no sound came out. The whole village cracked up.

While I was playing a woman had told Joan, in sign language, to follow her to find food. We had to climb over a low fence to get from the road into her restaurant; I guess the fence was supposed to keep the pigs out. We sat in her small kitchen on five-inch wide benches while she cooked a soup over a wood fire. It was a good noodle soup and she was careful not to make it too spicy. She must have cooked for westerners before. On the table she had two bottles of sauce and three plastic containers of spices. One of the sauces was bright orange, the other black, like soy sauce. She poured some of each into the soup, then added a spoonful of each spice. When she got to the last spice she indicated by sucking air through her teeth that it was very hot, so we declined.

After seasoning the soup she stirred it with an up-and-down motion instead of round-and-round. She tasted each bowl to make sure it was just right. It was good. Lao and Thai food can be really good because people like her care that it's good.

While we ate four children stuck their heads through the door. I felt welcomed and comfortable in that village but I didn't want to betray them by taking out our camera and photographing everyone. It just felt wrong. But I figured I could photograph the kids. They're shy of the camera, so if nothing else, they might leave us alone. It worked pretty well. Most of them laughed and scrammed at the sight of our Canon.

The road didn't get much easier. It kept fighting the drainage. We would go down for five km then start to climb idmmediately. We enjoyed a very few small valleys.

At one place an enormous boulder the size of a VW Bug had fallen on the road. At another place we got to see road erosion in action when a TV-sized boulder crashed down a muddy, 10-foot high embankment, preceeded by several seconds of dirt and small rocks and followed by a chunk of sod from the top of the hill.

We climbed three large hills that day for a total climb of 6,000 feet. The first hill was about 4,000 feet, the second was slightly lower, and the last was about 3,300. The only flat section of any length was the last five km into Maung Xai (pronounced Mong Sigh).

Next: Party with Lao Border Guards

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