We learnt in our first bike trip that Chineese made bike are easier and cheaper to repair. In Thakek, we don\u2019t have much choice anyway (apart the $35 a day 250cc Honda): the few bike shops only offer the Chinese bikes. And they rented all their bikes already! We get brand new bikes by 11 am: the Chinese guy just bought them and is removing the plastic protection to let us go for 6\u20ac a day.<\/p>\n
Mark from Hawai joins us for the 3 days tour. We met him in the bus terminal. He gets unlucky with his bike: his new bike makes very strange noise after only 50km: we have to go back to a mechanics. He dismounts the bike completely and changes the piston! Chinese quality\u2026<\/p>\n
This issue shifts all our tour, but we manage to see what we wanted within 3 days (read 3*24 hours). The scenery is stunning in this loop: the karst mountains hiding impressive caves, old trees flooded in the water, etc. The East part of the loop is quite a difficult dirt road, but anyway easier than the wet trail in Luang Nam Tha!<\/p>\n
The Konglor cave is actually a 7km river path under the mountain: very impressive, up to 100m wide and high! On an illuminated part, you can see the beautiful stalagmites.<\/p>\n
30km before Thakek, we drove 18km on a dirt road to reach the Khoun Kong Leng aka the Blue Lagoon. We were said that the road is very difficult, but it is now almost completely enhanced and leveled: only 1km is quite though. The lagoon is very impressive: I never saw such clear blue water before!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We learnt in our first bike trip that Chineese made bike are easier and cheaper to repair. In Thakek, we don\u2019t have much choice anyway (apart the $35 a day 250cc Honda): the few bike shops only offer the Chinese… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[59,17],"tags":[60,34],"class_list":["post-498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-laos","category-touristic-places","tag-motorbike","tag-nature"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p31eG3-82","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eric-creation.com\/wordpress\/travels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eric-creation.com\/wordpress\/travels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eric-creation.com\/wordpress\/travels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eric-creation.com\/wordpress\/travels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eric-creation.com\/wordpress\/travels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=498"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/eric-creation.com\/wordpress\/travels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":499,"href":"https:\/\/eric-creation.com\/wordpress\/travels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498\/revisions\/499"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eric-creation.com\/wordpress\/travels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eric-creation.com\/wordpress\/travels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eric-creation.com\/wordpress\/travels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}