Sa-Bai-Dee Sa-Bai-Da Lost in Laos...Bah...La la la la Life Goes On.

Or perhaps just a wrong turn.  The first night in Laos we celbrated great tasting Beer Lao and a curry Pho, well deserved after the 90 km ride from the border town of Lao Bao.  It was nice to have a taste of something a little bit different from the continuous Vietnamese food and their love of adding fish sauce to almost everything.  Once we paid the bill [$4] and headed out we saw a man across the street sitting in his shack motioning for us to come over.  We headed over and found his family and himself sitting down to a typical Laos meal underneath the awning of their brick and siding fourpost storefront.  The meal consisted of sticky rice, pieced cabbage and three types of dishes full of beef, duck, cilantro, onion and beans and lettuce on the side.  No chopsticks in this part so it was finger food shared between 8 sets of hands.  The man in his 60's but looking to be in his forties took a bit of a liking to Lannies nipple and reached over and poked it.  Funnier still was when the man himself pulled up his shirt to reveal his hairless skittle of a nipple for some reason. Some types of comedy and humour it would seem are universal.  We practiced broken english and broken Laos trying to figure out the dynamics of their family until one by one the family members departed back to their house which was just behind their shop that sold pop, water and chips.  Before we left the man showed us what he did for a living when he showed us the discarded munitions box that he was now using as a tool box that kept his welding/mechanic/jack-of-all-trade tools.  We left with heartfelt thank you's, goodbyes and prayered hands in front of our chests and headed back to the guest house just across the road.
The next morning we had made a plan to head down the major highway after getting some breakfast and directions from the locals.  When we asked about the way to Salavan they pointed in the direction that we thought and along the road that we thought.  It was a pock-marked road with sand and red dirt for most of the start of the hill climb up into the mountains and we thought that this was perhaps the norm for major roads in Laos.  After passing through numerous villages and seeing the likes of either motorbikes or guys on their front wheel drive carriage driven by a lawnmower engine [see photo] we assumed that we were no longer on the number 1, or rather we never started out on the number 1.  It ended up being a fantastic way to see the inner parts of Laos that I'm sure few people have ever seen. 
All the villages that we came across had field space enough to grow rice and keep water buffalo and the largest village that we would have seen would have had about 20-30 houses elevated on stilts.  Agricultural space is limited as there is still a large amount of UXO's [un-exploded ordinance] from the American War so farmers have little to work with.  We were wondering how much of the cost of cleaning up the area is being shouldered by the Americans.    Most of the days the children were out around the house saying Sa Bai Dee [Hello] or silently watching Lannie and I come through their village while some of the parents were on Laos time and slept in their huts which were nothing more than four walls six feet off the ground and an equal number of support posts to match.  Perhaps as a testament to where we were, when we stopped to get some water there was a table of children curiously watching us park our bikes and walk over to the display to get water.  As I moved a little closer a couple of the children moved/scampered behind eachother to move out of the way.  It may have been the beard or it may have been the colour of my skin but regardless it was interesting to see their reactions. 
There were enough places to stop and fill up on water and juice as the temperature was likely around the 30's but we were on limited funds as we had planned on being in a bigger city to get some money so we budgeted and ate/drank sparingly.  I think Lannie may be a few pounds lighter due to that one day of riding.  It was great to see the actual country side and lush parts of Laos and share smiles with the villages and community.  We came across several river crossings, most of which were navigable by carrying our bikes. At one river crossing we had the expectation of there being a bridge however the bridge among many other things was lost in the War forty years previous.  The locals obviously have a way of getting across so we piled our bikes and selves into a small boat that was being captained by a 12 year old and he kindly, and for the price of $10 took us across the Tad Hay river.  [Lannie has some good photos of the bridge and the boat crossing in his images]
After riding for half a day and still not really knowing where we were, we resigned ourselves to the fact that we'd get 'there' whenever and where-ever 'there' was.  "There" happened to be the small town of Tapangthong which we still cant find on a map, but it exists and is in between Muang Phine and Pakse on some country roads.  We pulled into town just as the sun was slumping behind the treeline and found the one guesthouse in town.  We ate greedily on our ration of one bowl of soup and one beer and headed back to the guesthouse still not really knowing where we were.
The next moring Lannie had some coffee with a merchant and a Dr. and they said that the road we were looking for was 3 km away.  With that in mind we enthusiastically started out on the terra-cotta coloued road to find the highway that would lead us into Pakse.  After 30 kms [that language thing again] we finally came upon the asphault and the sign saying Pakse 127 kms.  It felt good in a sense to be back on a paved road with the amenities should anything go wrong, but it seemed somewhat disappointing to be sharing the road with trucks, scooters and buses as opposed to water buffalo, front wheel drive lawnmower carriages and every person saying either Sa Bai Dee or looking at us with wonder.  Ah well we'll see what the next few days have to say for themselves.  So it goes.