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Published: September 24th 2012
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I left Luang Prabang for Chiang Mai at 6pm after my cooking class. The bus was only supposed to take 20 hours which was an improvement from my 30 hr Hanoi bus trip. When I got on the bus I was not impressed as it was more a minibus than the nice sleeping bus I had my Hanoi trip on. But I did have a whole bench to myself which allowed me to sleep with my legs twisted up against the window. This bus made an adequate amount of bathroom and food breaks which I appreciated. I slept most of the night, but around 4:30am the bus stopped and everyone clamoring out of the bus for what I assumed was a rest stop woke me up. I went back to sleep for about half an hour, but when I woke again the sky was lightning up and the bus still wasn't moving. I was the only person still on the bus so I got out and we were stopped in the middle of our lane behind a string of other buses and trucks. There was also a line of traffic behind us. I had no idea what was going on, so
I walked along the string of cars for about a quarter of a mile until I encountered what had stopped the bus: a landslide. The road was completely blocked by several feet of mud from the mountain side. It was possible to walk through the mud and anyone riding a motorbike was carrying the bike across the mud. But it would be impossible to cross in a bus. We ended up waiting for about 4 more hours before a bulldozer came and cleared the road. A nice enterprising local brought bread and fruit and sold it to us stranded passengers.
We reached the Laos/Thailand border around noon, but we had missed our connection and were forced to wait at a restaurant until 5pm for the next bus to Chiang Mai. I took the opportunity to change my Laos currency to Thai baht and I had an ice cream.
We finally reached Chiang Mai around 10pm and it was raining. I had directions to my hostel and luckily I spotted a landmark as we drove into town. It only took me about 10 minutes to walk to my hostel from where the minibus dropped us off in the middle
of the city. I was very happy about that. The hostel that I chose to stay at was called Sohostel. It was very clean and I had an eight person dorm room to myself for the entire 6 days.
Chiang Mai city center is full of beautiful temples and markets. The best market I visited in Asia was the Sunday market in the city center. It was very large with a wide variety of arts, crafts, food, and souvenirs and the vendors weren't overly keen on ripping off foreigners. I bought lots of cool stuff for less than US$30. Of course the next day I had to mail them all home and that cost almost as much, but still a good deal.
While I was in Chiang Mai I took a Thai cooking class. There were several different classes available but I chose the one I thought was the best value. I thought it was interesting, but it was alot like an assemble line. Most of the cooking prep was done by the school assistants and all we did was stand over a wok and add ingredients and then eat what we had cooked. If I hadn't been
to such a great cooking class in Laos it probably wouldn't have bothered me, but I was a bit disappointed in the Thai cooking class.
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