All gone to pot (holes)

We got up reasonably early and prepared ourselves for the next leg. We’d been warned that the next section was 60km of terrible road, leading deeper into the mountains. The road quickly degenerated from a road with small bumpy sections to a dirt track with exposed boulders split up by small portions of paved road. Now the world has head Chris Cluett is retiring all the roads have gone to pot(holes). Ha ha ha.
Anyway as the scenery around us grew increasingly luscious we careered round corners in delight, only stopped in our tracks by areas of thick sticky mud. Despite the burning sunshine large areas were pools of muddy water surrounded by trenches of slippy mud. No shoes were lost and we didn’t fall over but there were many close calls. As we slowly clocked up the kilometres 60km began to feel like a long way. At around the 50km mark we both started to tyre and were excited when the slices of paved road began to get more and more frequent.
We soared into Lak Sao, the next large town, ready for lunch. The town turned out to have few charms and after some arse massaging decided to push on to Khou Kham for our second night.
Thankfully the road was paved and the loop offered us up yet another driving experience. Lonely Planet described it as like playing a video game, which I guess is a reasonable enough analogy if the video game was produced by the Discovery Channel. The road twisted and turned , rose and fell dramatically as the mountains towered on either side. As Tim hummed ‘Get your motor running’ the sun finally came out and God seemed to be smiling at us.
We arrived in Khou Kham, tired and dirty, and found a lovely guesthouse with a magnificent view of the mountains. We sank back in our reclining chairs while we waited for our beers, admiring the view. When they arrived 30 minutes Tim used his classic reverse psychology technique of complaining, where he appeared very, very grateful. It was all so nice I was hardly annoyed at all.