Day 86, 96km: by Chris

Now that the emergency tyre is on my front wheel, my bike sounds like the workings of a ski-lift because it hums loudly on the Tarmac. This is because it is a knobbly cross country mountain biking tyre. I already had this special foldable lightweight tyre before assembling the bicycle first aid kit, and I'm not the kind of guy who spends £30 on a new road specific one if I've already got the other. At least it doesn't kill inner tubes. Unfortunately though, penetration punctures will now be a big part of my life again because I no longer have any puncture resistant tyres on my bike (Amy has them all) and the light weight foldable tyre is so thin I might as well have a party balloon wrapped around my front wheel. We passed lots of traditional Laos villages today, full of woven bamboo houses perched on wooden stilts below and grass or corrugated iron roofs on top. Many of these structures list and bow in all directions but the design is obviously successful regardless of my personal reservations. Under the house between the stilts is the Laos person's garage: Here we commonly see mum's wooden loom and dad's tractor-on-a-stick

A tractor-on-a-stick:

Traditional Laos family house:

. In almost every village all the children wave enthusiastically and after a while our return waves and greetings become more exhausting than the cycling itself. We cycled down long straight roads for the most part and tried to find a place to camp in the late afternoon. There were plenty of possibilities but as the schools had recently kicked out there were also plenty of annoying kids everywhere. Luckily I stumbled across a gueshouse (that's what most if the signs say in Lao) but as I was paying, Amy steamed past and missed my bike by the side if the road. She enjoyed an extra 4km today.