I Want to Ride My Bicycle!

When visiting places I love renting a bike to explore. So far I've gotten to do this on Coronado Island, Chicago, and it's a great way to see the monuments in DC. So when I found out I could rent a bike here for less than $2 for a whole day, you know I was going to take advantage of that.

So I loaded up with banana pancakes drizzled in local honey (So good!)

Then I rented a bike from the same place I had my pancakes, which is Noy's Fruit Heaven (they already recognize me here, the fruit smoothies are truly heaven).

My main destination was Pha That Luang. Here's the thing, Laos is not necessarily bike friendly...at all. I wanted to stick to sidewalks as much as possible, but you see the sidewalks double as parking lots, and often people with their pop-up markets are selling their wares, sometimes the sidewalks end with a high curb and it's either constantly stop and ease the bike down or take to the streets, and sometimes there are no sidewalks. And there are definitely no bike lanes. It was a lot of weaving, stopping, dodging, ducking. And even on a bike, I still got the usual question of "Tuk tuk?!"

But I made it without real incident.

I ended my exploration by biking along the Mekong. And then got some crazy fruit. There are lot of new ones to try here. This is called Rambutan. The outside is CRAZY! You pop the hairy looking shell off and inside is a sweet juicy thing, but you have to beware of the pit. I got a whole kilogram of these, since I had no idea how much that would be, and now I have quiet a lot of these. Good thing they're so good!