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Published: August 26th 2006
The School Kids
All the girls were a bit shy and none of the boys wanted to stand next to Bex! Coz she smells.Pete was feeling a bit rough last night, he came down with a bit of the stomach bug becca has had, but after some rehydration salts that the girl in Boots said would make him "Sparky" and some antibiotics, he's now feeling as sparky as ever. On a quick walk to the market later to buy Pete some more thongs as he'd broken his last pair a couple of days ago, we were aproached by a gang of thai schoolchildren, doing a questionaire on tourist attitudes to thailand. They then insisted they had a photo of us, so we got one too.
The first part of the journey to Laos was the public bus from Chiang Rai to Chiang Khong, this took about 2 and a half hours. We had imagined that this would be quite a popular route with backpackers headed to Laos as it is one of the main border crossings, but it turned out we were the only westerners on the bus that only had half a dozen people on total. After about an hour and a half the road could barely be classified as a sealed road. It was full of pot-holes and was almost worn
away, but the driver suprisingly managed to make it a pretty comfortable ride. Once we got off the bus at Chiang Khong we got a tuk-tuk over to the "ferry port" which was a five minute ride away, but we didn't fancy walking it with our rucksacks!
In the lonely planet it warns you to make sure that you get your passport stamped on your way out of thailand to avoid trouble later on. We can see why now, the immigration office is off the main road down to the pier and they wouldn't notice if you walked right past. Once we got this sorted we wandered to the pier, which isn't a pier at all, just a few boats moored on the river bank. We purchased out ticket from a man sitting on a bamboo platform having lunch with his family for 20 baht each then headed accross the river. 2 minutes later we were in Laos.
As you get of the boat on the Laos side of the Mekong, there is a small immigration office. When we arrived there were several officials stood around outside having a chat and a smoke, when we went upto them
The Border
We're in Thailand, the other side of the river is Laos! one of them re-opened the office and gave us some forms to fill in. Once we had done these he told us that because it was lunchtime they couldn't (or wouldn't) stamp our passports and we had to go back at 13.00! In the time it took him to write out a receipt, I'm sure he could just have stamped them but never mind. When we went back to collect them we noticed a mattress in the back of the office with one of the officials fast asleep - Laos people aren't the most energetic in the world!
The Lonely Planet describes Huay Xai as a "bustling riverside town". However, we didn't see any bustling at all, I wouldnt really describe one row of shops selling basic groceries as a bustling town!
Now we're in Laos it's time for a new currency. Aparently most places accept Thai Baht and US dollars as well as Laos kip, but we'd rather carry the local currency. The only problem is that 1 pound is equivalent to 18000 Kip and the largest note you can get is 2000! We changed 3000 baht which is a day and halfs worth of money and
we got 804000 - in 80 x 10000 kip notes. Quite a stack!
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