And days roll by, passing too quickly as if here, as if a few hours are lost from each. Morning salvaged by local coffee, the town small enough to have wandered yesterday but no desire to move on. It feels as if the pace has slowed, been caught by locality…

It's a small place, a tangle of streets branching from the main road, a cluster of guest houses, restaurants and trekking places, quiet. We rent a bike, set off north and west, soon out of town the road weaving through hills, following river courses through plantations of rubber trees. Pausing to inhale the landscape, village life along the roadside, fields and paddies between us and the lower slopes, a young girl and an adult beating dust from fronds of some kind, laying them out to dry along the verge. I go into my bag for my camera, find that I've forgotten it, curse then grin before smiling, reminding myself that this is why we have a memory, question my need for documentation, was I always like this? 

We continue, the roadside lined with plastic once again, dirt paths rising or falling towards villages sprawling across the hillsides, bamboo bridges across drying streams, .decide that the road's better than expected and so we'll continue on towards Muang Sing.

Then the road ends. Or the tarmac part of it, 14km to go and not enough fuel to turn back, onwards, winding down across broken stone and gravel linked by patches of road, the descent sharpening, dust rising, onward until hard packed dirt replaces the scree and it's possible to relax again, another km and the road resumes, 6km to town the fuel gauge now a question mark, we turn a bend and a petrol station appears as if a desert mirage...

A quick look around and it's already time to head back up towards the scree, approaching the end of the tarmac we meet a water truck, watch as the red dirt gathers into streams of muddied water, caught in a white out as a truck descends, a cloak of dust encompassing us, further, the last turn, the resumation of the road, relief.

And then, back on the edge of town, a misread map, rice paddies upon the plain across the river, time for a coffee and pick up my camera, head back to the fields in search of a sunset which doesn't arrive, the sun swallowed by the murk rising to embrace it. Further, the sun set, the merest traces of colour following, switch the lights on, no lights, full beam, no lights, press down, lights. Back towards town through bug laden air, finger pressed upon the light switch, fields dimming, the bike darkening at any need to use the indicators as we cross the river and arrive back at main street...