There were long stretches of the ride where you could fall into a humming sort of rhythm, almost as if your legs were propelling you forward without any feeling of effort, and the bike was floating; at those moments I thought, I can do this for hours! For days! For weeks! I can bike to Spain and then Russia and then—and then a scabby patch of road would jostle me and bring me back to the moment, and another castle would come into view.
Each night we stayed in a different sort of place—a bed-and-breakfast, a rustic inn that in a previous century had been an apiary, an old converted schoolhouse in a town center. The directions along the way were mostly exemplary but each night, as we closed in on our lodgings, things would go to hell and we’d cast around until we could find our way. Exasperating, but then again, none of these were big commercial hotels; they were wonderful one-off joints with kooky-shaped rooms and, in many cases, a kooky innkeeper who was running the place as a late-in-life hobby.
The balm for this frustration was often a bottle of a gorgeous local wine—a Pouilly-Fumé or a Vouvray or a sparkling Saumur—and a hunk of crottin de chavignol, the Loire Valley’s famous goat cheese, shaped like a wheel and tasting of nuts. Our wrong turns really didn’t seem so bad after that.
But on our third day, we rode for hours through my now-beloved wheat fields and down among some vineyards, and as the afternoon slipped into dusk we made our way through the city of Tours. We were staying in a town southwest of Tours called Ballan-Mire, at an inn called Chateau des Templiers. Easy. This particular day my husband, a more experienced rider, had gone on ahead.
The section through Tours included a patch of bad traffic and a mile or so through a grimy commercial district—the only sliver of the trip that wasn’t pastoral. No matter: surely we were close to Ballan-Mire. The route circled a city park and a university campus undergoing all kinds of construction. We lost the trail there, somewhere between a backhoe loader and a tower crane. Where there should have been a golf course, we found a torn-up soccer stadium and half-built faculty housing. Austin and I rode on and reached a stream that was not supposed to be there. We backtracked. A pair of young men were jogging past, so I flagged them down. Golf course? Ballan-Mire? Smiles all around, shrugs, a few gestures to what they thought might be the right direction.
We headed the way they had indicated, but the path petered out, ending back at the edge of the stream that wasn’t supposed to be there. Very few people passed, and the few who did smiled pleasantly, shrugged, pointed this way and that, then headed off. My patience was fraying. I glanced at my son, who was starting to list to the right on his trail-a-bike; I held my breath, hoping nothing would set off the question every parent dreads.
He looked over. “Mommy,” he said, “when are we going to get there?”
Busted. “A few minutes,” I said. “Let’s go this way.”
We doubled back again, tried another sidewalk, then another. Now the place was deserted. The sun tucked in behind some clouds and dimmed. We crossed one road, then another, each stretch mysteriously emptier and less marked and more confounding. I felt ridiculous. Lost here, of all places, in the exurban sprawl of a large French city? Wilderness, maybe, but here? So humiliating!
“Mommy, when will we get there?” Austin trilled. “It’s more than a few minutes.”
“I’ll call Daddy,” I said. Of course, my phone didn’t work. Why had I spent so much time buying Bag Balm instead of setting up an international calling plan?
“Mommy?”
“Oh, look!” I said, “a nice man!” We had just turned a corner, and there, in this peculiarly depopulated town, was a middle-aged man running a clipper over his hedges.
“Hello, nice man!” I yelled, probably sounding a little insane and keyed up, the way you can be when you are calculating to the microsecond exactly how much time you have before your child starts an endless loop of “When are we going to get there?” in high volume. The man didn’t notice us at first—that is, until I leaped off my bicycle and went running into his yard, shouting, “We’re lost! We’re lost! We’re lost!”
Within moments, his wife emerged from the house with a kindly attitude and chocolate cookies and orange juice and a cell phone, with which they called the unattainable Shangri-la of Ballan-Mire. I asked if they could call us a taxi and let us leave our bikes in their yard until the morning, but the couple seemed tickled by their windfall of visitors and the chance to help out. They decided they wanted to drive us there, so they loaded us into their car and delivered us, then made another round-trip to bring our bikes once we were installed and debriefed. It turns out that we had been nowhere, nowhere at all, near Ballan-Mire. Even after examining the map in detail, I couldn’t figure out how we’d gone wrong, or, for that matter, where we had actually been. It was as if we’d fallen into a wormhole for a while.
It was far too late to go out to eat, so our innkeeper insisted on making dinner for us; we sat around her big oak kitchen table, eating good pasta and drinking her wine, and trying to piece together how the bike path had vaporized. Out of it came a reminder of how the misfirings in travel are often what stick with you, much more than those things you think you’re supposed to care about and find inspiring.
We had one more castle to go, the marvelous Forteresse Royale, a huge blocky structure on a steep hillside above Chinon. We took a few wrong turns on the way—a combination of fatigue and inattention to our itinerary, and the recklessness you feel toward the end of a journey—so we rode into Chinon not along the river, pedaling steadily and slowly along the recommended route, but slaloming down a raggedy road that pitched nearly headlong to the river. It was crazy and exhilarating, the perfect punctuation to a day that had been gently mesmerizing.
By this time, I felt like Superman, like I could ride anywhere. I was happiest on the days we rode the farthest, the days we were on the road for five or six hours, zooming along as if I had done this my whole life. I was suddenly seized with the desire to do nothing but bike trips—the intimacy of the view, the chance to see and smell and listen as part of the travel, thrilled me. And the whole notion of chafing seemed ridiculous. Could I have really been begging people via social media to help save me from this? Maybe I would start a new hashtag: #pleasesendmeanywhereonabike.
The plunge into town, into the lap of the castle, was a great payoff. For me, the day had already been full, because I felt practically melded to my bike now, almost flying through those perfect tan and golden wheat fields that had sung to us on our way to Chinon. I now knew that on a bike I could see places the way I love to, close enough to notice the odds and ends that gave it texture, at a pace that made me feel like I was truly in it—part of it—and not just passing through.
Susan Orlean is the bestselling author of eight books, including My Kind of Place; The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup; Saturday Night; and Lazy Little Loafers. In 1999, she published The Orchid Thief, a narrative about orchid poachers in Florida, which was made into the Oscar-wining movie Adaptation, written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Spike Jonze. Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend, a sweeping account of Rin Tin Tin’s journey from orphaned puppy to movie star and international icon published in 2011, was a New York Times bestseller and a Notable book of 2011. Orlean has written for Vogue, Esquire, Rolling Stone, and Smithsonian, and has been a staff writer for the New Yorker since 1992. She has covered a wide range of subjects—from umbrella inventors to origami artists to skater Tonya Harding—and she has often written about animals, including show dogs, racing pigeons, animal actors, oxen, donkeys, mules, and backyard chickens. She lives in upstate New York and Los Angeles with one dog, three cats, eight chickens, four turkeys, four guinea fowl, twelve Black Angus cattle, three ducks, and her husband and son.
LAURIE WEED
Riverdance
Up a creek on a love boat in Laos.
Idling our boat in the deep, silty waters of the Mekong, we contemplated the mouth of the Nam Ou. It curved along a sheer limestone wall in a tight smile of tra
nslucent green, its shallow, hairpin entrance forbidding all but the smallest and lightest boats. Our riverboat, a traditional teak-hulled model with a four-cylinder Toyota engine strapped to its rear, was as long as a city bus but only four feet wide, drawing less than eighteen inches. Slightly fish-shaped and floppy with age, her tapered ends often moved independently of each other, creating a clumsy, snaking motion against the current. Flint and I had dubbed her the Spawning Salmon and, for better or worse, we owned her now. Planning a voyage of several days, we had just motored her gently up the Mekong, departing Luang Prabang at sunrise to avoid playing chicken with the midday barge traffic. An hour into our journey, the Salmon was already acting flighty. Her cooling mechanism kept seizing up, and the engine had the vapors.
Two weeks earlier, we’d hitched a ride on an empty passenger boat to explore the Nam Ou for the first time. After a few idyllic days of paddling in clear water and trekking to isolated Khmu villages in the upper valley, Flint wanted to follow the pretty river to its highest navigable point, a Chinese trading post called Hat Sa. I wanted a backstage pass to the real Laos, the land beyond the “tourist triangle.” When separated from an entire culture by language, economics, and geography, local transportation often provides the quickest route through the gap—if not from A to B. An open-air river journey, surrounded by dramatic karsts and a fringe of jungle, sounded far more enticing than riding a crowded bus or dull tour van up Highway 13. We’d asked around in Luang Prabang and found it was “not possible” to hire a boat to Hat Sa—something to do with fuel costs and territory disputes among the drivers. Naturally, Flint solved this problem by purchasing his own boat.
The idea wasn’t as insane as it may sound: Flint was practically born on a boat. He had built two of his own from junkyard scrap, and he could sail anything from a harbor dory to an English clipper in high seas. In fact, he had wooed me with a boat adventure when we first met in Burma, the previous year, and in spite of our many differences since then, I still told myself that any man who would buy an illegal fishing pirogue and paddle me down the Irrawaddy on a whim deserved a fighting chance. It was not the first time I’d fallen in love with a grand gesture, only to find that the moment always outshone the creator, who was after all only a man. Nonetheless, I had brought Flint to Laos, a place I found magical, hoping he would love it as I did, and I was willing to explore at least part of the country on his terms. Now the seadog in him was itching to be afloat again; he needed to be “unlocked in this landlocked nation,” he said.
As for me, I’m no mariner, but an old-school Mekong riverboat is a simple machine: two long ropes run up each side and wind around the steering column, controlling the rudder. Another rope, operated by the driver’s big toe, is the accelerator. There is no gearbox, so once you turn the key you’re going forward: no neutral, no reverse, and no brakes. It’s like driving a stretch go-cart on water. The Salmon was a pile of splinters and flaking mustard paint but initially, I didn’t see cause for worry. Every riverboat in Asia was at least as wobbly, if not more so. The old girl looked tired, but game for one more run.
Following an engine overhaul and several trips to the market for supplies, we launched our expedition, deciding to take the established route in slow stages before sailing off the map. On our first trip upriver, Flint had crouched behind the boat pilot the whole way to Muong Noi, furiously scribbling notes. Navigating the Nam Ou on his own, he claimed, would be “not too difficult, but definitely interesting.” I couldn’t tell whether this little adventure was driven by diehard romanticism or his outsized ego, but either way, he seemed happy for the first time in months. My meandering style of travel did not suit Flint; he was a man who needed a mission, and at last he had one.
Now that we were circling the point of no return, the plan seemed questionable and the boat even more so. The river looked faster and fiercer than I remembered. Sandbars and boulders had somehow doubled in size since our last trip. I knew what Flint was thinking—he’d repeated it often enough: “Rivers are like women; they change with the weather.” I was thinking neither of us was in top form for this—Flint had a snotty head cold, and I’d woken up with a slight fever and an ominously bloated stomach. Yet, no one suggested turning back.
Skirting the boat gingerly around the cliffs and into the Nam Ou, Flint stopped again and admitted to feeling “nervy,” which turns out to be British for “woefully unprepared.” During our final dash to the market, he confessed, he had lost the hand-drawn map and navigational notes from the scouting trip. Now I wanted to turn around, but it was too late; the Nam Ou was too narrow, and we were officially up a creek. Immediately, we faced an “interesting” section of current. As we hesitated in the shallows, a fisherman waved us over to the bank, where he hopped effortlessly onto our boat’s prow, guiding us through the first stretch of gurgling water with the precision of an air-traffic controller. We ferried him back to the side and offered to pay for his time. Smiling, the man shook his head, but his young son, who was peeking into our hold, looked up at me starry-eyed.
“Lacta-Soy?” he whispered shyly.
I handed the boy two boxes of the popular soymilk drink, and they went happily on their way. Once they were out of sight, I stopped smiling and addressed the Skipper.
“What’s your plan?” I demanded.
“Believe it or not, it isn’t my intention to get us killed,” Flint said, looking sheepish. “I’m a complete pillock for losing those notes, I know. It’s a very technical river, and I have no business driving it on the basis of watching someone else do it exactly once.”
“So, now what?” I grumbled.
“Well, I think we should find a nice, calm spot to camp. In the morning, we’ll wait for a passenger boat to come by. Any of those drivers could take this river blindfolded, so if we tag along behind one of those blokes, we’ll be all right.”
With the new plan in place, we eased our way upstream and dropped our makeshift anchor—a sandbag—on a narrow spit. Flint toyed busily with the engine, bailed out the boat, and set up our gas cooker to make dinner. Feeling increasingly unwell, I lounged in the cabin and surveyed the scene. A teenage boy wearing a castoff tie-dye shirt paddled close and stole glances at us while pretending to check his fish traps. A gaggle of children splashed in the mud against a sloping patchwork of vegetable gardens, and a few wary fishermen circled us in dugout canoes. Once they saw we weren’t fishing, they relaxed, and some of the younger ones hung around to sample Flint’s camp-stove spaghetti. They liked it so much he had to make a second batch for us. We turned in early and aimed to hook our little Mekong caboose to the first available passenger boat in the morning.
It was nearly midnight when I crawled out of the cabin and hinged over the side of the boat, deeply regretting the spaghetti as my stomach violently emptied itself. I spent the next hour heaped on the cold, wet sandbar, digging holes with my hands when I could and retching directly into the river when my strength was gone. On our last visit to this valley, we’d spent a night in a Khmu village, far from any purified water except the small bottles we carried with us. Waking up on a bare floor under a thatched roof full of holes, I’d accepted a cup of tea from our host, the village headman, choosing to play intestinal roulette rather than offend him by refusing his hospitality. Back in Luang Prabang, I’d picked up a course of Tinidazole at the pharmacy, just in case, but hadn’t counted on being in the middle of nowhere, boat-camping, if I lost the bet. When the worst of the intestinal spasms had passed, I scrounged through my bag, gulped a pill, and fell shivering into the boat’s cabin.
The next morning, moving very slowly, I helped Flint pack up. Then we sat back and waited for a boat. Hours went by, and aside from the occasional fisherman or farmer’s wife passing through, the valley was still. Out of sheer boredom, we attempted a short distance on our own. The engine sputtered, and Flint kept stopping to fiddle with it. After an hour of slow progress, we pulled over again on a stretch of fine sand.
“I don’t know …” F
lint yawned, rubbing his eyes. “Perhaps we ought to call it a day. What d’ya think?”
I must have been too delirious to think, or I might have recognized what could have been a graceful exit point. Instead, I said, “I think I hear a boat coming.”
The unmistakable clatter of a diesel engine echoed up the valley, followed by a half-empty passenger boat. The driver was flogging it upriver at an intimidating pace. Flint pushed us off and the Salmon hurtled after the other boat, swanning across the channel and then laboring to keep up.
“Can you see if we have water?” Flint shouted back at me. I was perched on the stern because the Salmon’s cooling pipe, an old bicycle part attached with a cheap plastic hose, demanded constant attention. Hanging on to the towrope, I leaned out over the back of the boat like some kind of displaced figurehead.
“No, we don’t!” I yelled back.
“Can you try priming it? Grab a bottle and pour some water back into the pipe!”
I made an effort, but it was like trying to ride a mechanical bull and milk it at the same time. As the engine began to whine, the Skipper’s pitch rose to match it.
“Can you reach that spit pipe without falling in? Suck on it and blow some air back in?”
“No,” I said flatly. “I can’t.”
Convincing me to inhale and possibly ingest diesel fuel mixed with cholera-water would be a stretch on my best day, and I had just spent the whole night losing my guts on a sandbar. Flint noted my expression and wisely changed his tack.
“All right—can you come up here and drive for a minute?”
I ducked through the cabin, scrambled into the cockpit, and placed a tentative hand on the wheel. “Uh, O.K… . what should I do?” I asked.
“Follow that boat!”
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