Laos - Arrival

We are now in Laos! It's misty and cool, at least up near the Chinese boarder where we are now.

We started the day with a slow departure from Chiang Rai: Mary won a Sony Vaio P-Series "Lifestyle PC" on eBay overnight, therefore we needed to pay for it and buy the other things online we want Mary's folks to ship to us along with it. This took way too long, as usual.

Anyway, it was a long hot bus ride to the border, and then a long hot 3km walk to the river, then Thai paperwork. Then we hired a boat for the actual border crossing (there is no bridge!), which was quick and cool.

From Drop Box

Then there was Laos paperwork and payment for the visas, passport stamping, etc. Then we paid way too much to get on the 5pm VIP air-con bus to Luang Nam Tha, which left late and broke down along the way, getting us in around 10pm. We weren't so sad about paying the extra however, since we got two of the last 4 real seats us the bus, which ended up being so full that a couple lucky folks got to sit on plastic chairs in the aisle. I kid you not. What we could see of the scenery before it got dark was very nice. We checked into a funky, somewhat dirty, less than totally functional (in the morning there was no running water!) guesthouse at the bus station and fell asleep.

This cool little critter was sitting on the wall by the door to our room. We were impressed by the resemblance to an old dried up leaf, which would have been even more convincing somewhere other than on the inside wall of a building.

From Drop Box