Of Hairy Spiders, Rainforests, Mountains and Team Zen plus: we learn how to clean algae out of our bike bottles. 

By the time we arrived in Phichit, we had ridden 118km. We were exhausted and it was getting dark. The town was bigger than we expected. We kept looking for hotels but didn't see any. We were just about to give up and ride back through town and search again when we noticed we were on the doorstep of a five-story hotel.

They gave us a room on the top floor for 450 baht (about US$10) Thank God they had an elevator. Funny thing. The lobby was quite fancy. But the room was totally falling apart. It had an extra mattress laying on the floor, a pile of crumpled blankets on the bed, and a half-full open bottle of water in the fridge. The guy who carried our luggage into the room didn't seem fazed that our room looked like someone else had already checked into it. Since the carpets were stained we felt no guilt about string up a clothes line across the room to dry the clothes we washed in the sink.

Dinner was awful, which is weird for Thailand (though a little less weird in the north than the south). We ate at a little food stall up the block. Bugs attacked and we didn't end up eating our chicken because it was practically raw. I kept thinking about salmonella poisoning.

A lot of times when we ride we meet people and we would like to give them a gift, but we don't have any. Usually we end up giving foreign coins. That night we decided to go to Phichit's department store to stock up. They had an amazing amount of baby clothing--really nice stuff at near-Western prices. After much dallying we settled on some barrettes for girls.

The next day, we began riding over the foothills near the south end of the Luang Prabang range, on Highway 12. It's a beautiful road. We rode just 83.5km to a resort we had read about. It wasn't as hard as we expected. (That would come later). The last 20km went gradually uphill.

At kilometer post 44, we pulled into Rainforest Resort, a sort of New Age retreat with little cottages surrounded by lots of landscaping, and on the edge of a raging creek. It's just past a roadside stand that sells tire furniture!

Lawn chairs, chaise lounges and baby swings, all made entirely from strips of painted tires. Hope that baby swing doesn't catch fire.

I was worried we couldn't afford it, but we weren't exactly ready to keep looking. They asked for 1000 baht (US$25). I was ready to fork it over, when I asked them to clarify which room we'd get, as described by their brochure. "This one?" I asked, pointing to a photo. "discount?" the lady thought I said. "Yes, discount," I said. "For two people, 20 percent," she said. So we got it for 800 baht. We really should bargain more often.

Since we were running out of time on our Thai visas, we couldn't plan on hanging out at the resort for several days. Which is sort of a waste. I hate checking into a really nice place for only a few waking hours. Eric and I managed to relax in our room for one hour before dinner. Later that night, Eric saw a huge, creepy, furry spider in our room. It was so big and hideous--bigger than any spider he'd ever seen, even in a museum, he said--he wouldn't let me see it. How romantic. He made me stay in the bathroom while he killed it. He was afraid if I saw it I'd have trouble sleeping.

The big climb came the next day, July 9, when we rode 86.4km to Lom Sak. We made one long climb in the morning, then went over lots of rolling hills at high altitude. Actually, we never got higher than 3,000 feet, but it felt high, because it was exhausting. We rolled into Lom Sak totally weary, We ended up in a kind of run-down hotel but walked to the fancy hotel next door for a nice dinner.

The next day, I was too cheap to pay for a nice breakfast next door, so we ended up eating out of a 7-Eleven fridge, which I didn't think was too bad. We went over more rolling hills to Pu Rua. Pu Rua is near headquarters for the Thai communist party, which was stamped out in the early 90s, when according to our guidebook, the government gave amnesty to most communists. It's now a national park. Pu Rua itself wasn't too thrilling. But we got a great two-story cottage (second floor was too hot, and unusable) and the woman who ran the hotel's food stall was really nice. She taught us a few more Thai words. I can't remember them now. We should have made more of an effort to learn when we first entered the country. Since we were just days from the border, we weren't really motivated to learn in Pu Rua.

Somewhere along the way we met a woman in a gas station who spoke a lot of English. Turns out she had studied business in Evansville, Indiana, where her brother is a doctor. We met a lot of Thai people who had lived in odd places in the U.S.

We finally got some downhill on July 11, on the ride from Pu Rua to Chiang Khan. Actually it didn't feel like downhill. By the time we finished the 100km ride, we weren't thinking straight. Someone asked us where we had ridden from and it took me several seconds to remember. They said how it must have been a large downhill, but I really didn't remember it that way. (Eric's altimeter says we descended from 922 meters to 750 meters, but the 'descent' included 750 meters of climb).

Big tour buses had arrived before us, so almost every hotel was full, which is the first time we've had that problem anywhere on the trip, except maybe some towns in New Zealand. We found one guest house that offered us a "room" with a sheet for a door. We told the innkeeper we might take it but wanted to try more places first. Luckily, we found a room at Zen Guest House. (Later, we would come to know 'the sheet.').

Zen is run by two cyclists, Katie, an American from Maine, and her Thai husband Dtaw (and Dtaw's mom who owns the place). They're a great pair and lucky for us, they had good advice on the road ahead. A few years ago, they had tried, as we thought we might, riding overland from Thailand to Lhasa. That covers some serious mountains, plus it's 'closed' to foreigners which means the police can kick you out of the region on sight. Katie and Dtaw rode up the Mekong Valley towards Tibet, slept at truck stops, had trouble getting used to the altitude, and finally, they were caught.

They hadn't reached the border of Tibet, though Katie says they were in Tibet, since the people were Tibetan. The police escorted them to an airport, where someone followed them inside to make sure they bought a ticket out of the region. They ended up flying back to Kunming, China, and then back to Thailand. They never made it to Lhasa. Now they have two babies and lead bike tours of Northern Thailand.

Their tale was an eye opener. Back in southern Thailand we had thought maybe we could ride overland to Lhasa, even if it meant avoiding police by crossing some police checkpoints at night. But as we got closer, we looked at the map more closely and saw what huge distances (3,500k? from the Laos border to Lhasa) and major mountains are involved. Also, our China visas are only good for 30 days, plus a probable 15-day extension (LATER: we learned that it is easy to get not just one, but three or four 30-day extension! This was true as of September '98).

There's no way we can ride 3,500km to Lhasa, plus another 940km to Kathmandu, all in 45 days (or even 60, come to think of it. We like to stop in towns for days at a time when possible). Unless we basically miss everything we're riding through.

Katie said we should fly to Lhasa (you can do this from Chengdu for 1,950 yuan as of Aug '98). We had considered it, and in light of her story, we decided it was the only way. Our goal for our China visa is to ride the Friendship Highway from Lhasa to Kathmandu, not to get kicked out of the country before we get to Lhasa. So we decided to fly.

She gave us another great tip: how to clean algae out of your bike bottles. Fill your bottles halfway with water, throw in a handful of raw rice, and add a little baking soda. Let it sit for several minutes and then shake like crazy. It really works. Our bottles were extremely grungy and were almost totally cleaned with this method. Don't let the water sit too long or the rice gets mushy, and loses it's scrubbing power.

Those last days in Thailand were great. We rode right alongside the Mekong through Sang Khom to Nong Khai. The road was mostly flat with just a few hills. We were surrounded by rice padis. We saw great sunsets over the river. Friendly kids yelled hello.

One hello led to near-disaster. The morning we left Chiang Khan, one kid yelled in such perfect English (Good Morning!) that I figured I had to wave back. I did--and swerved, clipping Eric's bike. Eric lost control but managed, in 10 long seconds, to steer off the road so he crashed in a ditch instead of on the pavement. He wasn't hurt but he got thorns all over his arms and he was pissed. The whole time, those friendly kids kept yelling Hello! and Good Morning! And laughing. A few seconds later a car pulled over to see if Eric was OK. It's nice to see how quickly people stop. They arrived just in time to see Eric throw his helmet onto the highway in disgust. I smiled and waved the car on.

Sang Khom: We met a nice couple, Toy & Toy, who ran our guest house. They said there were six couples in the village where both husband and wife had the same name. It's a great guest house but try to eat somewhere else.

We had hoped to rest once we reached Nong Khai, since we'd be arriving on our ninth straight day of riding (usually we only ride three or four days in a row). It has a lot of temples and monks. It's a small town, with a cozy feel. It even had a (German? Danish?) restaurant where Eric ate meatballs for the first time since forever. (Maybe Australia). We are typing this in more than a month later and Eric still remembers how good those meatballs were.

Nong Khai would have been a nice place to dally. But we had to send an express package to the U.S. and Nong Khai had no courier service. So we had to either take a bus south to Udon Thani, or race onto Vientiane, just across the Mekong. We decided to go for Vientiane.

Next: Laos.

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