Laos Continue

Saturday,

We woke up early to go to Savannakhet, the second biggest city in Laos. It is not big though, more like an average town. Left early in the morning after a good sleep with all the insects probably crawling all over us when a sleep. The weather was great and it was nice driving past so many people walking on the road to work. Carrying baskets and there tools heading to the field. Later in the day we went past many rice fields. Where people were cutting the rice plant, all done by hand. Drove on gravel roads most of the day. Arrived early and walked around town and had dinner on a floating restaurant on the Mekong.

Sunday,

We did catch up with a French guy Jerome over breakfast. He joined us and took us to monkey forest near by. We had bought bananas and Viggó and the monkeys were all happy getting them. The monkeys were cool and we took some back road twist with Jerome back to the main road were he went back to Savannakhet where he lives and we continued up to Thakhhek.

Monday and Thuesday,

We woke up early, well 8 o’clock to do “the loop”. It is a loop recommended to on motorbikes in the lonely planet. It is recommended to do it in three days because there is lot to see and the road is in bad conditions in places. The main thing for us in this loop was to see a hydro power plant they are building up there. Apparently there have been a lot of arguments regarding this plant. So we started by heading east and got soon surrounded by beautiful limestone mountains.

And after a few hours ride we came to the power plant. It was nothing spectacular, looked like an average Icelandic power plant in size. Then we started to drive up the mountain, up beautiful twisty tarmac road that did turn into a beautiful gravel road at the top. We covered I would guess around 100-200 km at the top before getting to the dam site. But the funny thing is that all the time driving up there we were driving by the lake made for the power plant. Then the dam was a big disappointment, just a tiny dam. This lake is huge in size but very shallow. After leaving the dam site the road got really rough. Nothing so bad but the instead of driving maybe 80-90 km/h average on gravel road it probably went down to 40-50 km/h. It was probably fine road when it was built long time ago but not been maintained for decades I would guess. But finally around 100 km later it turned into tarmac again. We decided to try to reach the capital city that day and went for it. It got dark we getting into the city and it was so hard to drive. Lot of dust, many without a light and cows made the driving hard. But we made it fine and did manage to drive the three day loop plus another 200 km to the city in one day. Totally we drove 530 km that day which is our record. Sore and tired we went to bedNext day we took it easy in the capital, Vientiane. I did spend most of the day trying to sort out papers to be able to apply for new drivers license that I lost in Thailand. The city is really nice to hang around in, but there is not really much to do there.