A first glimpse of Laos

OK, so we changed into Laos via a 11h bus ride. Completely filled up with stuff that bus. This includes some sort of fish, the container of which was apparently leaking with the result that Kyras backpack was swimming, literally, in that stuff, with the result of having a nice fishy smell in all her stuff now... I hope we will not be followed by cats now all the time.
Other than that, fairly painless bus ride, and good news for all Swiss citizens, you can get into Laos visa free for 15 days. Yay! The little village Savannakhet where we are now seems very mellow, gives a good feel. It even has a dinosaur museum! And I can now proudly say that I held an original T-Rex femur in my hands, how cool is that! Well, we ate a good meal next to the Mekong river, sweated in the scorching Lao sun and made up our plans for the next months. There might be some surprises, but we'll have to see how doable our ideas are.
We will start with skating southwards direction Cambodia tomorrow, and hope to cross the border before the 9th December, as our allowed stay ends then.
Cheers

Our last days in Vietnam - with a detailed instruction on how to "fix" a broken skateboard on the road

 

Hi folks

After the sudden end shortly before we reached our destination, this proved to be not to bad. As we were forced to take a bus out of the jungle into civilisation to avoid getting more water into the broken skateboard, we luckily escaped the rain (finally..!). Hoi An at the central Vietnamese coast proved not only to be dry, but also a lovely little town to stroll around, sit at the mooring or in a cafe and wait for all our stuff to dry. Although also here there were traces visible of the heavy rain in the last weeks, as with high tide, the water level in the river rose and flooded a small part of the town twice a day. We even finally managed to go to the beach for one day, although it was to cold for swimming, it was nice to see the sea and put our feet into the sand. 

On the repair side of things it doesn't look that good. I didn't find either a woodworking workshop, nor a do it yourself store or similar to provide me with the few tools, glue and paint that I would need. Also, it seems that the construction of the board proved to be unsuitable for long distance skateboarding, as the two different types of wood that made up my skateboard did not react to water in the same way, they did not expand equally what led to tension and the separation of the different layers. The biggest problem with this is now that the wood did not get smaller again with drying, but stayed two different sizes. Which makes it very difficult to compress the board in a way that the smaller diameter wood could be glued together again. Short: it's almost impossible to repair the board decent without having a workshop with the appropriate press. Well, with the help of a Swiss army knife, rubber mass with peppermint flavour and red nailpolish I did what I could. It should be at least waterproof again, but the riding character of tail and nose will be different now. Let's hope it will last for some more kilometers before it completely disintegrates.

On similar notice, Kyras board, which was built out of only one type of wood, bamboo, is fine and looks as fresh as on the first day (except of some scratches that the 'so-happy-to-ride-a-skateboard-once-in-a-lifetime'-Vietnamese left as souvenir). And my camera is fixed as well, just need to fill it with pictures now.

With this issues resolved, we are looking further so skate some more. For that we will leave wet Vietnam and change over to apparently sunny Laos. A mountain including some rain between us (in Hue) and Laos (Savannakhet) lets us take another bus. There we plan to roughly follow the Mekong river southwards to Cambodia. Let's hope for good roads!

Cheers

Robert 

 

 

 

End of the Vietnamese leg

The Vietnamese Leg has ended. And everything went faster than expected. And wetter. Besides that one scorching hot day on which we already complained in an older post, it rained every day. Hard. This had the effect that we started to skate faster and faster, to get faster to a dry spot. We pushed our daily distance to around 65km a day.
So after our last post, having spent a night in this seedy roadside hotel, we skated another day in the rain and found another cheap hotel to spend the night dry. Nothing spectacular happened. Our bearings were completely rusted at that point, although having been cleaned two days ago. Another round of cleaning and greasing the bearings up, and we were ready to power through the next stretch, fueled by eight baguettes before lunch. Tasty stuff those baguettes, a leftover of the french occupation. This allowed us to do around 70km. Maybe also the inglorious help of a bastard on a motorbike played a role. That guy showed up in late afternoon, and harassed us while driving next to us. Sometimes pretending to hit us with his bike. We stopped, he stopped. We speeded up, he kept pace. This lead to us trying to outskate him for a while, which unfortunately didn't work. At one point we had a Swissgerman/Vietnamese argument and tried to make him leave us alone. Nope, he instead tried to get at my pocket. Fortuna came to help us by blowing the guys fuel line on his motorbike, which allowed us to escape him. For two minutes. I absolutely didn't want to camp with that guy close to us, and luckily in exactly that moment we passed a hotel. Finally we got rid of that guy!
A good night of sleep, then we started skating through the Phong Nha Khe Bang national park, beautiful karst mountains covered with dense rainforest. And the only serious pass in our Vietnamese leg, called Deo da Deo. Took us at least two hours to cross it. On the other side slowly the villages started again, where we met a kid with a self made skateboard. Basically a plank of wood, with two sticks as trucks and some old bearings as wheels. At the south end of the park, we checked in to a hostel, to have a day of rest and visit the famous caves in the national park. Amazing! We only saw one, called paradise cave, apparently the biggest dry cave in the world. That was really impressive. And empty of tourists. Aaand it had an absolutely stunning stalagmite, shaped like a giant open pinecone, which made music. Like a gargantuam xylophone of stone, that was played by drops of water falling from the ceiling. One had to be very quiet to hear this beautiful, fragile concert, which even added to the atmosphere.
Back in the hostel: the shock. When having a look at our skateboards to make them ready for the last days, I recognized that my board is broken. It must have happened just before we arrived! It has three big delaminations, meaning that the different layers of wood that make up the skateboard, have separated, leading to some gaping cracks that leave the wood completely unprotected. If I would skate it in this condition, it would suck up water like a sponge, and possibly delaminate further, making it completely unskatable. Now I know why the board started creaking like an old plank during the last days.
Well, this means that the Vietnamese leg is over and we have a forced break until I find a way to fix this thing.
Its not to bad though, as we were very close to our destination anyway. Summed up we skated almost five hundred kilometers, 487 to be precise. We saw jungle, water buffaloes, crazy Vietnamese on scooters, countless karaoke joints, several weddings, ate mediocre food, drank Vietnamese moonshine, smiled and waved like the pope when we passed villages, let about thousand people try our skateboards, pushed until our legs bled. One crazy experience.
Now we have this break, will fix the board and the camera, do some touristy stuff in the meantime, and probably continue skating in Laos soon.
Cheers

Full rain day

Uh uh uh, today was hardcore! It never stopped raining, it just changed back and forth between drizzle and pouring. We thought that we got wet the last days. We were wrong. We got wet today. We were so soaked, that we gave in and checked in into one of those seedy roadside hotels, just to get out of the rain. Before letting us in, they recommended their gardening hose to us, to get the thick crust of dirt from our legs, shoes and boards.
And hey, weather forecast says zero percent sun in the next five days, whoop whoop. What have we let ourselves into here?
But the spirits are still up, we will skate this bitch in pouring rain and dedicate it to Neptune.

Cheers

Getting soaked in Vietnam

Hi Folks
News from Vietnam. We are still skating on the Ho Chi Minh highway, and are getting soaked every day. Be it from our own sweat on sunny days, to common water when it rains. It just does not seem to be possible to arrive in dry condition in the evening. Or to dry your clothes over night because of the high humidity. I think soon we will have algae growing in our stuff like sloth in their fur. After three days and 150km, we had to take one day off, as we both had a "wolf" from constantly moving wet. Every push was pain full, so the day off was in order to recover and go further. Plus we found a nice camping spot right at a lakeshore. But as everywhere in Vietnam, there is no privacy because there are so many people everywhere. Let's say we were the entertainment of the day for the kids of the nearby village. Oh and the day before we had a whole family of ten watching us from the moment we woke up to the moment we had packed up the tent and left. Last night we found a camping spot in the front yard of a church, very peaceful. Although the churchkeeper was OK with us camping there, her daughter wanted us rather in her house, so in the end we spent the night on their front porch. Which was OK, because it was dry. It didn't save us from having the whole community that had gathered in the church for service that evening, to come over and have a close look at us and our stuff.
To wrap it up, its hot, its wet, there are many people, and we have skated the magic number of 50km a day, counting 200km now.
Cheers