We had heard Vang Vieng was "pretty," but spectacular, amazing, or incredible is more like it.

The map shows that Route 13 makes an unusual U-turn just south of Vang Vieng to get around a mountain. On the north side of the mountain lies a long, flat east-west valley. A limestone wall abruptly terminates the valley's west end. Within the valley an occasional limestone monolith juts up like a thumb from under the earth.

We entered the valley in late afternoon. Small but thick gray squalls smudged the view here and there ahead of us. Lightning flashed in the distance, the temperature dropped and cool gusts whipped. The valley felt full of energy. We must have drawn on that energy, because we rode very quickly for the last 10km of that day, somehow not running into any squalls.

We stayed in a bungalow along the Nam Song river near the base of some of the most spectacular cliffs. The cliffs are typical "karst topography" which I had never seen except in books. The silhouette is very irregular and jagged. It's not sawtooth because the dips are sometimes very deep and the rises sometimes very tall. If you look closely at the top of a single mountain you can see a miniature (fractal) version of the range's jagged irregularity.

In the morning we walked across a pedestrian suspension bridge over the river. I think it's the only toll pedestrian bridge I've ever seen. (It's new--until a few years ago the only way to cross was find a boat). We read about caves in the cliffs but didn't have high expectations. Sometimes caves are awesome but mostly they're just muddy horizontal holes in the ground.

This one was fantastic. It had large chambers, giant slippery-looking stalagtites everywhere and constant dripping water. Someone had put walking paths and bridges in and had done a good job with colored lighting. It was far better than it would have been if we had seen it with just a flashlight. You see the strange colors (mostly reddish orange and brown). Much of it looked like the color of cows. One strange oozing rock actually looked like a cow, one painted by Salvador Dali.

We left around 11 a.m.. The road followed the Nam Song valley for a spectacular 25km further upstream. The cliffs continued on our left, getting even more spectacular.

As always, people yelled "Where you go?" or "Ou allez-vous?" When we answered 'Kasi' that afternoon, many people said, "oh no no. You must not. Too steep." At least that's what I think they said. Most people here bike around with a passenger on the rear rack, and they only have single-speed bikes, so naturally the hills are too much for them.

The ride was constantly beautiful. We stopped every kilometer or less for another photo, few of which captured much. At one pleasantly terraced rice field a dozen or so people leaned over as they stood ankle-deep in the mud, gathering rice into lots of foot-tall "haystacks" We put on the zoom lens and took a few shots. I felt a little bad about that. Especially with the zoom lens I felt like we were treating them like zoo animals. Since Borneo we've tried to be especially careful about that. To make up for it, I played Scotland the Brave for them. They loved it and cheered and laughed when I was done.

After we crossed the Nam Song at Ban Phatang, it started to get steep, but the grade peaked at 10% and the road had signs to prove it. It was hard work but fortunately an overcast sky kept it relatively cool.

We stopped to rest about halfway up the main pass. A motorcycle with a stainless steel box on the back drove up. The driver squawked his clown-fire-engine-style horn. He wore a black fedora with a black string around his neck to hold it on. I thought maybe it was another ice cream man, so I flagged him down.

It was the bread man. He had a box full of baguettes. The French influence in Laos wonderfully lives on in the ready availability of good bread. He sliced the baguette as if for a sandwich, and poured on sweetened condensed milk before we could stop him. It cost 500 kip (15 cents). It was good.

At the top of the pass we saw a village of 50 or so identical, evenly spaced, new-looking thatched houses. (I later heard the Laos government is in the process of moving the tribes that live high on the mountains down to lower elevations, and they are doing this by building these villages. Unfortunately I know nothing of Lao politics.) When we were still 200 meters away, the village children sprinted down the path from the village to the road to greet us.

All day we worried, just a little bit, about the bandits that had caused trouble on this road around Kasi, our destination. We passed a checkpoint, with a uniformed government official. We stopped and everyone laughed. I think we could have kept going. The official came out and asked where we were going and coming from. Everyone asks us that and he wasn't particularly formal about it. He looked at his watch. It was 3 p.m. and he told us we'd make it to Kasi in two hours.

A bit later, we saw two motorcycles stopped ahead of us. As we approached, it looked like they were preparing to start, as if to intercept us. Could these be our bandits? But as we neared I could see they were putting baguettes in their bags. The bread man had apparently just passed.

Sure enough, a few hundred meters later we heard the honking and saw the man with the fedora rolling slowly through a village. He waved as we passed. A few kilometers out of town he passed and waved again. He seemed like the happiest guy in the world.

I thought that would be the last we saw of him but just about 12km from Kasi we saw him again, this time pushing his motorcycle. He smiled and waved and this time pointed to his engine and shrugged his shoulders.

The road flattened out and the rest of the way to Kasi was a breeze. We stayed at the only guest house, a rather blah but clean enough place. We had to carry all of our stuff up a flight of slippery stairs, always a pain.

Just after dinner a couple from the Netherlands checked in --on bikes! They were the first bike tourists we've seen in Laos, and the first since Team Discipline (aka Team Swiss) in southern Thailand two months before. We were very excited to talk to them.

As we stood in front of the guesthouse admiring their bikes, someone tapped me on the shoulder. It was the bread man. He had pushed his motorcycle the last 12km into town, and he was just arriving, well over an hour after us. He was still smiling.

The bread man with his broken down motorcycle is happy; the rice harvesters leaning over in the mud are happy; the postal workers are happy; the relocated kids at the top of the pass are happy. Can anything get these people down?

Next: Dutch Cyclists and the Bandit Road

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