A Flat Tire in Laos

A faint hissing noise from one of our scooters startled us an hour before sundown: a flat tire. My two friends and I were standing in the jungle somewhere along a 120 km stretch between the towns of Attapeu and Thang Beng on the Bolaven Plateau in Laos. Where exactly – we weren’t sure!

Referred to in our map mysteriously as “Road of Unconfirmed Status”, the road had turned into an isolated, narrow singletrail of compacted mud only an hour out of town that morning. Snake-like it wound its way through the leafy bushes and the skinny, grey stems of Lao’s national “Frangipani” tree. Above our heads the dense canopy revealed only fractions of the blue sky and except the muffled roar of our scooter engines, and the infrequent, alien screeching of crickets, an eerie quiet lingered. The trail was challenging, forcing us to push and carry our bikes through streams, getting stuck in thick mud and scratching ourselves and the bikes on thorny twigs and roots. Nevertheless, we had persisted for more than eight hours because we had gotten what we had wanted: an adventure.

Now, however, I felt foolish and intimidated by the situation. With little gear and no food we were unprepared. Our only option was to push the bike to the last settlement we had crossed a few kilometres up the path.

When we arrived a group of local men quickly took to the tire with improvised ingenuity while a few women and children gathered at some distance observing us shyly. With the flat fixed, darkness had descended on us and we gestured for a place to sleep. A man eventually motioned us up the stairs of one of the wooden houses on stilts with a thatched roof. Crossing our legs we sat on the floor of the main landing around a paraffin lamp bellowing black smoke where he soon joined us. Using gestures and a few phrases from our guidebook we tried to learn more about his family. However, the only thing we were sure we gleaned from the exchange was that the name of this smiling, gentle man sitting opposite us was Sim. A woman emerged from the dark with a tray of food. We had not eaten since breakfast and pounced on the sticky rice and the small, whole fish dipping it in the spicy chilly-shrimp paste. Our interaction was reduced to smiles as we sat chewing quietly.

After the meal we were soon motioned to sleep on a thick duvet underneath the family’s mosquito net, which had been set up in the corner of the landing. As we lay exhausted the soothing sounds of the lives continuing outside slowly eroded my nervousness. I listened to Sim talking quietly to someone in the adjacent room. Just outside the thin wooden walls there was faint laughter and chatter from other houses, amid scurrying chickens and dogs. It was then that I realised we were going to be just fine.

- Marius Kaiser

Marius Kaiser is a German travel writer based in Düsseldorf, you can reach him at

marius_kaiser /at/ yahoo.de