NONG KHIAW – MUANG KHAM

The mountains here are about 1, 500 to 2, 500 meters high. We are driving the road marked as „dirt road all wether” (dirty road at all the weather), which actually means, there are no many tourists here. Locals at some villages in these lonesome places are staring at us as if we were from Mars and the kids are hiding in the bushes screaming. It’s a harvest time for the rice, so the roadsides are covered with palm mats where the grains of rice and of these tiny red peppers each dish is full of are drying. Actually, cuisine here is similar to Thai one: when eating Tom Yam soup, the feeling is as if I was sitting in the hot sauna. “Sticky rice” – a kind of rice being cooked in a special way to make them sticky and very delicious – is an edible thing one can get just everywhere. 

Driving from a hill I got in a little mind-blowing accident. All of a sudden my tail brake just ran away into the floor, and my heart fell down, too. We had to dismantle it to see what happened since it’s not that easy to go on forward brakes only. However, there are no obvious defects, and spare set Artur gave us in Riga doesn’t really fit. We put everything back together and decide to drive prudently. There is no really a place for our tent in the jungle, that’s why we have to plod on to the next town somehow and find a guesthouse. The last 100 kilometers are made in the dark already, and the cows are the biggest problem then: they actually think that the best place to hang out is a dark road. There is the only one guesthouse in Muang Kham and its entry is decorated with big unexploded American bombs. No single tourist in the hotel, I wonder why.