Around the World and beyond.......Rad_venture

When I started riding my dad told me something I remember every time I sit on my bike

"son, there is not a question whether you are going to end up on your ass or not, there is only a question WHEN? and how prepared are you going to be!"

Sounds like a fun trip, how long did it take while using the back roads? I did it once from Houston to Phoenix and until I reached El Passo I did not have much fun

Plus I'm not sure whats worse 110 dry in AZ or 104 humid in TX.

That's for sure! Time to get high - Cottonwood, Sedona, Flagstaff.

Getting closer Chinese border I could definitely see some changes in food offering. One evening while riding through a small village I was really craving for a piece of meat on a grill. Noodle soups with different meats are everywhere and most of the time are cheap & delicious. As with everything if you have it too much you get sick of it; and this was my case with Pho.
So when going through this village I noticed few restaurants having bbq going on so I turned around and came to check it out. It smelled good because they were using many spices. When I looked closer I started doubting whether this type of meat was for me....can you guess?



since this point I was MUCH MORE careful what I was eating.

It payed off few days later when I walked to a kitchen to check what was on their menu. They did not speak any english and I could not figure out what they were offering me. This one should be easy to guess





after the guy showed me their daily menu I asked him to show me what else they had. He opened one of the freezers they had in their kitchen; I had no clue what animals were inside. Some of them were not skinned yet. I wanted to quickly take photo but he closed the freezer very fast and did not want me to look again. I guess they had some prohibited animals there.

Ah rats!


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That really is FAST FOOD! Likely more healthy than the OTHER fast food WE eat!!
JJ

And then what happened? I'm guessing you caught up with Ed and have been having too much fun?

Regardless, really enjoying your reporting. Hope all is well.

All is good here; for a certain reason I cannot report on progress. You are partially correct with your assumption but there is a bit more to it.
Stay tuned, the whole story is coming shortly.

The WHOLE story Radim?
lol
This coming from the guy wearing........not one........but THREE Magic Strings on his wrist!
Don't worry everyone. What he misses, I will fill in the blanks on my RR.
LOL

I believed there was an unwritten rule....what happens on the island stays on the island!

Ok guys, finally I am back; next few days I will try to catch up with the report to get it into presence. I am just figuring out in which point I stopped.

I believe the last post was when I left Sapa, little town in north of Vietnam and rode towards Chinese border. I really liked the area and enjoyed many beautiful views. North of Vietnam was definitely one of the most favorite parts of South East Asia. The only thing which was making my visit not as enjoyable was constant rain which was irregularly switching on and of. On the other side the temperatures were quite peasant.

To get out of Vietnam into Laos I picked the most northern border crossing located in mountains but still used by many Chinese tourists visiting this region. Leaving Vietnam was extremely easy. Immigration guy was very friendly and asked me many questions about my trip. The customs guy was a bit serious and confused when I showed him my carnet and asked him to stamp it. First he was just saying "no, no possible", then I slowly explained what I was asking for and showed him where to stamp and which paper to keep which made him happier and 2 min later I was ready to leave Vietnamese border. From my feeling this border would be much harder to cross into Vietnam.



Then the Lao border was just typical mess; they tried to make money on every single procedure they needed to do. 1$ here $2 there for various stamps and the best one was $3 for working over the weekend and after 17pm. I really tried to argue with them until the guy pulled out officially looking sign that had all the charges listed (still not convinced that it was genuine, i think they just made it to get some cash into their pockets). Also I saw that locals had to pay it and one guy told me that it was mandatory.

After leaving the Lao/Vietnam border my plan was to ride through the north part of Laos to the border with Thailand pretty fast.

Most of you probably know that entering Thailand without a guide is quite difficult. From what I heard there were some borders that let people in Thailand but there were all in southern Cambodia. Northern Thailand was the main reason for this nonsense to start due to Chinese tourists so the borders officials were fully aware of the guide situations.

This did not stop me to go and try to make it into Thailand without a guide. Last thing I wanted to do was paying these people 1000 USD for basically nothing. I my determination was very high but sometimes you also need a bit of luck. To get a safety net, just in case I could not get into Thailand, I asked one permit provider from Thailand to start my permit process. They had all my details from previous crossing so it was very easy. I would use it if everything else fails.

Welcome back !
I'm ready for some more serial stories

I just noticed that Photobucket started charging $40/month for 3rd party hosting....thats ridiculous. WTF!!!! this is going to be hard to transfer the photos to somewhere else and link it back to the RR

The internet is full of a lot of pissed people due to this. It is messing up a lot of folks and websites.

Are you a "Plus" user? I had to start paying like $40 year a few years back for more storage, and evidentially that made me a "Plus" account. The Plus Accounts won't have their "3rd Party Picture Use" restricted until December of 2018...if you can believe them. Old ride reports are going to be really boring soon as so many users use PhotoBucket. I never understood their business model and how they make money, looks like pretty much like an extortion scheme. Not sure where I will post pictures in the future either.

I was not the "plus" user so right now all my old photos are blocked and not displayed. Because Photobucket was really shitty, few months back I switched to Imgur which works pretty well and its free.

What I understand Photobucket wanted to make money on prints, not on storage and sharing. It looks like the old model did not work.

Riding through the north part of Laos was really enjoyable; roads were nice, traffic was nearly none and surrounding was green and beautiful. The only thing which was crap was the weather. One moment it was raining like crazy and 30 min later it was hot and sunny. While riding during raining I noticed that my front tire slides when cornering. First I thought it was just some oil on a street; but then it started to be more and more often. In one straight section I was going around 80km/h and wanted to test the road surface so I gently pulled the front brake. The abs immediately stepped in, that was shocking, suddenly I realized that the asphalt surface was like ice. There was not an oil spill as I originally thought, it was the type of asphalt they were using. When it was dry it was actually pretty sticky but when it got wet it turned the road into an ice ring. I had to be very careful not to end up on my arse.



That day I made it to my first Lao/Thai border. If any of you need more detailed information send me PM. I will not be mentioning names here, I don't want to give Thai agencies ammunition to go to the border official with complains.

First of all I was surprised how huge the border crossing was. When it was designed they were planning to get through significant amount of people. When I arrived it was totally empty. There were no people just couple of trucks waiting to leave Laos.



On exit side in Laos there was one police officer to deal with immigration part and 2 girls dealing with customs. Within 5 minutes I was stamped out of Laos and ready to go to Thailand. Before I set off they asked me to wait for a car escort. Apparently motorcycles were not allowed on the bridge over Mekong river but they made an exemption for me.



My strategy on Thai side was pretty straight forward.....dum dum dum as much as I can. After making it over the bridge Lao police let me go. The size of Thai border facility was pretty same as on Laos side and of course there were not any people crossing the border. What was interesting here was amount of police officers. EVERY checking point had one guy sitting inside and waiting for something. I had no idea why so many police guys were there just playing with their phones. It was totally ridiculous!!!

After parking my bike next to a check post nothing happened for about 10 minutes. I knew they could see me but nobody wanted to deal with me. Then I just went to a window and showed a guy my passport; he looked at me and kept playing on his phone. After 5 more minutes he made it out and I explained him what I wanted to do. He looked very confused and had no clue what to do. He then started asking other guys in their checking points what to do; I could not understand but it looked like they also had no clue.

Then he asked me to follow him with all of my documents. Next to an office building there was a bench where more police guys were sitting and playing with their phones. They looked at my documents and it looked like they also had no bloody clue. Then we walked into an office building where more guys in uniforms were sitting and doing fuck all. Suddenly one of them grabbed my carnet and passport and started explaining the guy who was dealing with me something in Thai. At this point my chances on crossing this border shrunk into very small probability. This guy was fully informed what was going on and few minutes later they started to apologize to me that due to Chinese tourists their government approved a new law and that I have to have a permit, a guide and all that nonsense. I argued with them for about two hours trying different approaches from aggressive to depressive, but it all looked like they were not willing to change their minds. I think that the main problem was that all these people were new and nobody had even experience with the previous process. Even if they wanted to help me they just did not know what to do.

After couple of hours of arguing I did not want to lose more time and headed back to Laos. It was really easy to get visa at arrival and get carnet stamped. I was gutted but even more determined to make this happen. I could see how confused these border guys were.

Probably slippery due to a high oil content in the tar which the water brings out.

Yeah I guess it was the oil in the tar; this type of surface was everywhere in south east Asia....it was pain it the arse.

Another case with slippery surface was in Albania; I am not sure whether I showed this photo before. My travel was very close to finish on this mountainy road in west north of Albania. They were making new road surface, it was really nice and smooth. In one hairpin curve I was going like 30-40 km/h when suddenly my bike started traveling sideways. To make it more interesting, at the same time a truck was going up against me in an opposite direction.

On the photo you can see two marks of my front and rear tire basically going sideways and marks of a truck braking hard to stop.

All ended up ok; that evening I got a bottle of vodka and really enjoyed it. Since then I am VERY careful while riding on newly laid tarmac surface......great lesson learned