Bye Bye Chiang Mai, Hello Laos

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Hey y'all, we left Chiang Mai on 21st: Felt quite sad to be leaving cos it is such a great place, so many happy memories, the people who ran the hostel were brilliant. We headed to the Thai border with Laos in the morning and a couple of busrides and a quick boat trip over the Mekong River later and we were in Laos, at a place called Huay Xai. We got our visas sorted in quick time, found a hostel and headed out for some food by the river. Huay Xai is a pretty small place and people only tend to stop there for 1 night and use it as a base to travel to other places around Laos.

The old women who ran our guesthouse were pretty crazy, but friendly enough. We sampled our 1st "Beer Lao" that night, it's supposed to be the best Beer in South East Asia, and it only cost about 50p for a huge bottle (Apparently Thailand don't allow Beer Lao to be sold in Thailand because I suspect they're scared it will outsell their locally produced beers "Chang" and "Singha")

We woke up earlyish on the 22nd to catch a slowboat to Pak Beng. This "slowboat" down the Mekong River wasn't as luxurious and calm as we had envisaged in our minds. It was over 6 hours till we arrived at Pak Beng, and the slowboat was packed to the rafters, including about 20 random tourists drinking Beer Lao on the roof?!?! (The wooden seats made it far from comfortable aswell)

We got a basic hostel that night costing us about a quid each- We met up with The two Dutch girls (Astrid and Evelyn) and the German girl (Alex) that we met on the trek in Chiang Mai (They were on the same boat as us) and had a few Bevys before bed. Tommorrow we hope to take another slowboat to Luang Prabang.

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Photos

The relaxing "Slow Boat"
Very slow, but not so relaxing!

Another day another slowboat
Leaving Pak Beng en route to Luang Prabang