Day 3 (10.02) – Rest day and sightseeing Mau Chai

After a fitful night, and every part of me aching, we decided to stay the day in Mau Chai to see the town, and revisit our planning.  We decided to seriously rethink our plan of going through the mountainous norther region of of Laos with the bikes – the original coarse planning meant 2000+ vertical meters per day for about 5 days straight – not something that I could do so early into the trip!!

We wanted to plan an alternate route, but were hampered with a power outage for most of the day – the power was just cut at 7:30am and we were left without knowing when power would be back to get internet connections to do some planning.

So, it was off into town and the surrounding countryside for some sightseeing.

  Mau Chai is a quaint little town, probably know to lots of tourists because they have a huge offer of “home-stay” with local families – mostly in stilted huts with large common rooms where multiple people sleep – supposedly you get a good feeling for local life, though the places we saw were extremely touristy, with lots of local crafts and souvenirs to be bought.

But the gentle excursion into local countryside gave us a good feel for local farming life.  The town was surrounded by rice paddy fields – all just before or in the processes of being planted – LOTs of manual labour.

We also walked around town to see the market (about 1km along the main street), and Jörg was in need of cash from the only ATM (bank machine) in town.  When we got to the machine, it was still working (despite power outage in the whole town), but after standing in line for about 10 minutes, the person just ahead of Jörg announced that the machine just ran out of money.

Other images from Mau Chai

We suspected that these guys hanging up decorations were responsible for the power outage.

The upcoming Tet festival (Vietnamese New Year) is the biggest festival in Vietnam in the year.  Numerous vehicles were loaded with various LARGE budding branches (similar to Christmas Trees?) which are then taken home and decorated with ornaments and lights.

Our local restaurant in Mau Chai – Noodle soup for breakfast, noodle soup for lunch

We also discovered Vietnamese coffe – a thick syrup-like coffee that gets filtered at the table into condensed milk – it takes about 5-10 minutes to filter through, all the while the cup is kept warm in a bowl of hot water.  Extremely intense and superb taste – I think we will be drinking a lot of this.

Once power came on again, we got to some serious planning for the next little while.  We figure we have until about middle of March to get to Ho Chi Minh, then 2-3 Weeks to get to Bangkok and 2-3 Weeks in India/Nepal.  We redirected out travels and will head now to the coast south and east of Hanoi, and head down the coast for a while (until around Da Nang /Hoi An area), and then head over to Laos and cycle down the Mekong for a while.  We did some fine-planning also for the next 7-8 days given that it is Tet Festival on the 16th/17th and we were not sure how it would be finding accommodation.  So for the next coupld of days we will head to the region around Ninh Binh (and spend a day there looking at caves and rivers running through them) and then head due south to be on the Beach next weekend when the Tet festivities are in full swing.