A windy, winding way down south

I had most gratefully accepted the offer to set out along the sinous road which slithers Southward like a bathing snake alongside the crazy communist and his professedly insolent Dutch confidant. Our vehicles were revealed as the enormous bikes were unsheathed from their army surplus covers each with a cavernous side car adding to their magnitude. Our things packed away neatly into Gary's side car, whilst I was to ride up front with the irrefutably more competent and reliable Dutchman who owned the company Corner Adventures which provided tours around South East Asia, China, Tibet and Nepal. Willem's father has been a close friend of Gary's for many years, and so throughout his youth he had become accustomed to Gary's habitual haranguing and the two of them bickered incessantly much to my amusement.

We raced on out of town slicing through the warm morning air quickly leaving Gary lagging far behind! No match for our somewhat startling speed. I tightened the straps on my helmet and clenched my jaw in concentration as I adjusted to the pace and moderate g-force. Sitting in the sidecar was a sobering experience as the shallow sides suddenly seemed potentially inadequate at containing a human being particularity on the sharp bends, but I easily adapted to leaning with the bike and utilising some yoga influenced groundedness to thankfully keep me safely inside. We slipped our earphones in to enjoy solitary soundtracks, and whilst following my enquiry Willem simply shrugged his shoulders and admitted to listening to the Top 40, I employed a seasoned playlist of my most esteemed psytrance to provide a thumping bassline for the exhilarating journey.

With the wind rushing past my face and through my hair I couldnt help but succumb to an enormous smile in flighted felicity, floating my hands though the supportive walls of air as I gazed on at the beautiful scene at my fingertips. Huge rolling mountains dissipated and disappeared into the ochre glow of the hot dusty day, covered in thick, lush arboreal carpet glowing into the distance as green as emeralds under the suns resplendent rays. The road was reliable for the most part, save a few instances when cracks along the inner edge caused my driver to veer right in a grand quixotic maneuver, bringing the weight of the side car and its occupant rising menacingly into the air as we transferred momentarily to two wheels, much to my sudden surprise and delight. Every 30km or so we would pull the green flecked camoflaged beast over, suddenly plunged into silence as the winds ceased, whilst we waited for Gary to catch up, curving sensibly round tbe corner in his sand hued motorbike anywhere up to fifteen minutes later.

We stopped for petrol every few hours and were met by an excitable surge of children vying for a look at the vehicles and the white people that drove them and we tried in vein to communicate or simply resigned to juggling to impress them. Seeing the roads so close and intimately made the country inordinately more palpable and despite the fact that the estimated 4 hour journey quickly crept into 7 or 8 what with Gary's innate procrastination, and we descended into a more dark and ominous night setting speckled with the somwhat painful whip of rain drops, it was a marvellous journey. We stopped over night in Vang Vieng before departing for Vientaine at 9am where I alighted around lunchtime. I bid farewell to the intrepid and quarrelsome bikers and booked a bus to the 4,000 Islands of the Mekong river on the border of Laos and Cambodia.

After an excesively late overnight bus down to Pakse, 6 other travellers and myself found ourselves stranded at a dusty old bustop at 7 in the morning. My onward bus and boat ticket to the Islands was apparently an utter scam as no operatives could comprehend its purpose, so I felt a bit sore at having been had by the well to do and incredibly amicable man in the smart air conditioned office of Vientaine. I guess this is a heist locals pull regularly to helpfully fuel local trade for the onward travel operators using unsuspecting occidents good if not foolish faith, as I would invariably be forking out more to Southern taxi drivers and get to my final destination.

Precarious crampavan

However, in the early hours we found the next leg difficult to organise and aftwr mucn kerfuffle eventually found ourselves allowed reluctantly aboard a large canopied truck with two parallel benches running down the length perhaps designed for a maximum of 6 to 7 people on either side. Having forced a querulous and gratingly acerbic Loatian woman to move her handback and allow me to sit down, we watched as the truck filled with roofing tiles, potatoes, plants, fruits, shopping trolleys, clothes and probably the kitchen sink amidst a staggering 45 people at the journeys zenith. Compared with the spacious, blustery freedom of my cosy little sidecar, uncomfortable was an understatement. But the cantankerous old woman and I managed to settle our difference amiably trading sticky rice for my boiled sweetcorn, so all was well and I began appreciating the warmth of the albeit capricious people again.

The islands were a little haven of beach huts, gloriously laid back restaurant proprietors and hammocks, and a languorous day and a half quickly dissolved into sunrise yoga, swimming and late nignt hammock dwelling with an intrepid artist from Switzerland, an amiable Lesbian from Holland and a rabble of French invalids who had recently suffered a resonably disastrous motobike crash but were thankfully not seriously harmed and in fact remarkably jovial. Another horrendous journey to the border awaited me the next morning, followed by a further foisted ticket fiasco, before I found myself in Cambodia en route to Siem Reap to meet my university buddy Mia at 8pm. I was seriously ebullient to be seeing a friendly face amidst the previous few months of self appointed travel planning since Jack's departure. And while I adore nothing more than the independence of my own hapdash company and direction, my private moments are interminably dappled with ignominious intervals of flight fiascos, botched buses, taxi turmoil and general turbulent solitary travel, so the prospect of the scrupulously cautious and well organised travel partner I was heading to meet was as alluring as a recently laundered and sweet scented pair of fluffy socks to comfortably slip onto my battered and weary feet.

The width of the magnificent Mekong bathed in a lustrous golden sunset