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It took us two days to make to the Laos border, passing through Lai Chau, Thang Phang, Muang Lay and finally ending up in Dien Bien. Warned by other cyclists, we opted to bus through the roughest sections of road. Except...we didn't. Due to some very grandiose dam construction plans that will fully submerge several villages, the road between Thang Phang and Muang Lay was a soupy quagmire of gooey red mud. Good thing I love mud because I have lots of tread and no fenders, so my bike and I were a moving ball of dirt. We made it through the best of the sloppiness and assumed it went on to our final destination, so we opted to hop a bus as suggested. By some stroke of crazy luck we rolled in to town with just enough time to find a hose and (when the electricity kicked back on in the nick of time) power wash ourselves and the bikes enough to be allowed to ride. Turns out the road cleared up 10k out of town and the pavement was smooth as silk the entire way. Something got lost in translation, but I'm not sure I would have done it any other way in the end. The entire region is mountainous and people mostly subsist on small plots on impossibly steep hillsides. The seasonal slash and burn practices mean that smoke gets stuck in the valleys making it hard to breath or catch the view. Taking the bus allowed us to skip past the fresh blazes and the long climbs through them that would have meant sucking in lung fulls of the ash that was constantly falling from the sky.

We caught the 5am bus out of Dien Bien with an interesting bunch of Westerners. The border road was in the middle of reconstruction, or maybe construction...either way, our bus was stopped for a couple of hours while bulldozers destroyed and recreated a cliff side ledge for our passage. The trip was otherwise seamless and the road completely skipable. No regrets there either. We arrived in Laos severely strapped for cash and a 100k from the nearest ATM, so we made a quick exit from our drop off point at Muang Khua and headed along the Nam Ou river to Oudamxi. Despite the lingering smoke the ride was gorgeous and it made me fall instantly in love with Laos. I can safely speak in general terms and say that there is no traffic here. I've made it half way through the country and could probably keep a daily finger count of the number of cars that pass. People are incredibly friendly and we get non-stop enthusiastic greetings and waves from just about everyone we pass. The kids are especially with a friendly "sabaai-dii." We head out before dawn every morning to get as many miles in during the coolest hours of the day as possible. Even at that hour there is no chance of missing the goings-on of village life here. That's perhaps the best part of traveling by bike anywhere. What makes it so great here is that Laotians don't seem to give a care whatsoever about odd looking foreigners passing through on odd modes of transportation that look like hermit shells on wheels. Nobody jumps in the road or attempts to screw with us when we pass, there isn't any yelling of things we don't quite understand but can pretty solidly interpret as unfriendly. We enter into plenty of clumsy but jovial conversations when we sit around to make food stops. The food is fantastic of course, and my favorite mid-ride meal at this point is pho. Most villages have a stand serving their version of rice noodle soup. We stop to lap up an aqueous meal or two en-route and stash a bag of sticky rice in our packs for snacking.

The smoke remained heavy through Oudamxi, so we opted to head for higher ground and spent a few days in Phongsali. The town was spared during the war and still retains inflections of Yunnanese influences. Unfortunately, the smoke made its way up there too and smudged out what would have been epic views. The bus ride up (yep, more haenous road) was an adventure alone. We were put on a rogue overflow mini bus, which meant that our lunch stop was a pull over spot along a road side stream trickle instead of a jam packed bus stand. Everyone piled out and headed for the bushes to do their bizz, washed and cooled off in the trickle, and then copped a squat in clusters of at least 5 strangers to share a meal. The road was all boulders and loess, so after nine hours of bouncing along while sweating profusely we arrived blanketed in layers of yellow, gray and red dust to match the changing shades of the road.