Vietnam to Laos

The path from Sapa to Laos consisted of a few days of riding our bikes and a few days of throwing them up on buses to avoid some particularly nasty roads. Despite our best effort to avoid the truly heinous stretches of road, we still ended up with a wonderfully muddy 25k ride into a small town called Muang Lay that required a quick hosing down of the bikes and riders before they allowed us to continue on the bus. From Muang Lay to Dien Bien Phu and then onward across the border into Lao consisted of many hours of sitting on a bus on windy and/or rocky roads... uncomfortable...but it did manage to save our bodies and bikes from close to a hundred miles of fist sized gravel on hilly roads in tropical heat. One moment of note was our early morning entertainment on the bus ride out of Dien Bien Phu, which consisted of a DVD of a lingerie fashion show set to raging techno music. If you're not stoked about your upcoming 6 hour bus ride, nothing lifts your spirits like techno and underwear at 6 in the morning. Aside from that the bus ride was uneventful but bearable, as always my 6'5" frame doesn't quite fit into buses meant for people half my size.

After a few too many hours on the bus for my taste we rolled into Muang Khoa and our first destination in Laos. Our enthusiasim was quickly dampened by the fact that we had spent close to all of our money paying for our Visas into Laos, and sadly there was no ATM in Muang Khoa for us to restock at. What this meant was scrounging up and exchanging what few dollars we had and making a bee line the next morning for Udomaxy and its ATM's about 100k down the road. In the end it wasn't that big of an ordeal, but I definitely had a few moments of panic considering what would happen if we couldn't get money in Udomaxy and trying to figure out what I might have to sell to get us to an ATM.