Touring in Asia

[NadiaMac]

I went on a 500 mile supported tour in Laos over christmas and it was a fantastic experience. Relatively low traffic roads except when we were rolling into Luong Prabang and Vientienne, beautiful countryside, fantastic friendly people and such an interesting experience riding through rural mountain top villages. Some pictures are up on my blog, see dec 2008-Jan 2009.

I would recommend looser-fitting clothing when touring in SE Asia (eg, mt bike shorts rather than ordinary road shorts, looser tops with sleeves, or simply pulling a loose pair of gym shorts over spandex, etc.) because it is considered immodest to wear tighter fitting clothing, especially in the more rural northern bits of Laos. We were advised that spandex while riding was OK, but to pull on a sarong if stopping in a town or to chat with people. I hadn't packed with this advice in mind, so did the entire trip with regular bike shorts and a loose short sleeved jersey. I didn't suffer much harassment (some cat calls and jeers in northern super rural areas), but if I were to go again, I'd definitely take looser clothes that did not attract the attention of the spandex.

We also rode in Northern Thailand, which was a bit more relaxed about the clothing issue, but again, if you stop at a roadside temple (which we did fairly frequently), you wanted to have more clothing on than the usual spandex bike outfit (knees and shoulders covered) as it's considered disrespectfully to enter the temples with less attire and in some cases to even be on the temple grounds without suitable attire.

I really recommend riding/touring in rural Asia. Although I did a supported tour, I think an unsupported tour in Laos would be manageable despite the profound language barrier and relatively small number of folks who speak english. There just aren't that many roads and the people were so friendly and helpful. There was an 85 year old guy on my tour who had been on 5 unsupported tours in Laos and Vietnam in the last ten years...