I Heart Chiang Khong

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After visiting the amazing Wat Rong Khun, we drove on, eventually arriving in Chiang Khong, to a darling little guesthouse which overlooks the Mekong River, with Laos clearly visible on the other side. With an afternoon of free time, I went walking around the street, then browsing the food being sold on the side of the street. I came across some interesting things. Eels, which were still slithering around in their bucket- I saw one manage to escape into the crab net before being recaptured and replaced. Dead squirrels... something that looks like roadkill for dinner, yum yum. Something that looked like a beehive, but was really full of grubs. It goes on...

I had gotten it in my head that something a lady was selling was bamboo sticky rice, which I had had the day I went elephant trekking and found absolutely divine. In retrospect this might have been largely due to the fact that it served the purpose of settling my stomach after a very queasy ride.

But anyway, the woman was only selling them in bunches of 6, for 10 baht, which I thought was amazingly cheap, but figured I could either save most of them for the boat ride the next day, and share them around. Trying to open them proved that what I had bought was not in fact bamboo sticky rice, it was just plain bamboo, used for cooking. So I gave it to the cook when I got back to the guesthouse and she added it to my green curry for me. She laughed when I gave it to her. Every Thai person who saw me with it were tending to get the giggles. I think it was just blatantly obvious that I was the ignorant Westerner who had just bought something I had absolutely no use for.

Anyway, back to the roadisde food, after a bit of sampling of fruits and such, I eventually came across a place that was really selling sticky rice. I bought it, because I was most definitely now in the mood for it. It was good. Unfortunately it went quite a bit of the way to spoiling my appetite for the banquet dinner we had that night. Oh well, I still managed to fit in enough green curry, omlet and noodle soup to satisfy me.

Next morning we got up nice and early, so I got to watch a bit of the sunrise on the Mekong River. Then a quick trip to get stamped out of Thailand, a trudge through some mud to get on a boat, and across the Mekong River to Laos...

P.S. I think you need a good imagination for this particular blog entry, because as you can see, nothing much happened, and I stupidly didn't take pictures of the roadside food. But, when you think about it, do you really want to see a picture of a dead sqirrel? Didn't think so.

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Photos

Sunrise on the Mekong River
Almost worth getting up early for.

A Monkey...
Oh yeh, did I forget to mention? Our guesthouse had a pet monkey. It was agro. I would be too if I was in a cage.