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We broke the ride to
Savannakhet into two days, with a stop the first day in Tha Khaek.
Although the ride along the Mekong was pleasant enough, from a tourist
perspective, neither Tha Khaek nor Savannakhet had much to recommend
them. It is not that either were bad places, it just seemed as though
they had little invested in terms of effort to make them more inviting.
Both towns function more or less as a place for tourists in transit
crossing from Thailand enroute to Viet Nam. Outside of a few military
types traveling in vehicles with US government plates and trying
desperately to look civilian the hotel we chose was empty.
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The crossing at
Savannakhet was over what is known as the Friendship Bridge II. We were
told that motorcycles were not allowed and that we would have to hire a
truck and load our bikes in order to get across. We decided to go for
it anyway and just plead that they were too heavy to load into a truck
(not so far from the truth). It is hard to understand these rules
anyway on roads like this that have almost no traffic. This bridge had
right hand traffic on the Lao side, and switched to left hand at
mid-bridge. After we got through the immigration and customs on the Lao
side someone whistled at us to try and get us to pull over, but we
ignored him and pressed on. Thai immigration told us the Laotian
officials had called and said we had forgotten to leave them a copy of
one of the documents. The woman at Thai customs graciously offered to
take it and hand it over to the people on the Lao side.
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I
think that you know that you are starved for visual stimulation when
the only thing you find worthy of photographing during the course of
the day is the sign at left. You have to admit though that it is
thoroughly informative. Not only does it signify this as a facility for
men, it also demonstrates proper technique. At right is an evening shot
of the Wat at Lak Meuang in Khon Kaen. Khon Kaen is a university town
that is equally famous for its nightlife. It is roughly an hour and a
half south of Vientiane, and it had only taken us three days to get
there. Bangkok was roughly five to six hours from here, so we got an
early start and by 9:00 we had ticked off a good part of that. That is
about when we threw the chain off of my bike. It was the cheap
connector link that had given out, and after about an hour of
unloading, struggling to get the chain and our last connector link back
on, and reloading, we were back on our way to our third visit to
Bangkok in three months.
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