There was suppose to be an Earth shattering ka-boom?

There is suppose to be a remote village in South Eastern Laos that is both relatively untouched by tourism and also the epicentre of tiger country in Laos. The book said 3-4 hours to travel 84Km and should only be down on four wheels. Right. How bad can a road be? I haven't yet encountered one I couldn't get a scooter over. Our first obstacle turned out to be finding where the hell we were suppose to go. There are no street markings, road signs or directions of any sort in this part of the country so we were reduced to saying the name of the village slowly and loudly, several times over to locals until they eventually pointed.

The road started off as a dirt road but not too bad. Or first sign of trouble should have been the detour we had to make about 5Km along which sent us through a stream (as in, pushing the bike through knee high water) and subsequent village. The road works slowed us down quite a bit with a lot of sand and pot holes but it wasn't until we reached the stretch of road that wasn't being worked on that we realised we were in trouble.

Picture of the state of the road to the village and me loosing (and subsequently finding) a flip flop in the mud.

Anyways, 2 hours, 1 thong lost in the mud and 35Km later we were still well short of our destination with sunset rapidly approaching. We finally found someone who spoke a bit of English and could understand our garbled Laos who told us to turn around. Given the warning that villagers in these parts don't go out at night for fear of tigers we decided this was a good idea.

The next day we rode over the Bolaven Plateau which is a bit cooler due to it's elevation and saw some lovely waterfalls.

This one fell 110m and was mighty impressive.

Down in the bottom corner of this one you can see little old me swimming out to the falls.