Biggest Challenge: Riding through the Northeast of Laos on a motorcycle

With a cheerful mood, Ansgar and I started our journey towards Vietnam on our motorcycles to meet our father, Rudolf.

After just two hours, we left the paved road and continued on a reddish-brown muddy dirt road, always going uphill. Already on the first steeper slope, I got stuck (because I had shifted down too late) and couldn't move forward or backward. Luckily, a Laotian couple and Ansgar came to my rescue and we continued on many curves, some of which were very steep, up into the highlands of Laos. My mantra for that day was 'Meter by meter' and I focused almost exclusively on the road directly in front of me.

Those few days were certainly one of the biggest challenges of my journey. A few years ago in Germany, I used to have mini nervous breakdowns when I had to drive a car, and now in Laos, I was riding on bad roads and dirt trails through the mountains with a fully loaded motorcycle. Sometimes it was bitterly cold, our hands were barely feeling anything, or it was pouring rain, and we were riding through winding roads in the jungle. We had motorcycle problems or still couldn't find accommodation to sleep in the twilight. But in the end, something always worked out and we experienced daily surprises and grew from them.

The relieving fire to warm up after a bitterly cold day. Afterwards, we had a few shots of homemade LaoLao liquor and sang karaoke :)

After a few days, we reached Sam Neua near the border with Vietnam and decided to continue traveling by bus due to the cold. So we put our bikes on the roof of the bus and crossed the border to Thanh Hóa.

And I was really glad to be sitting on the bus for this stretch and not on the motorcycle :)

From Thanh Hóa, we traveled by train to Hanoi.