Crossing into Lao

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We’ll the time has come to say goodbye to Chip, he was due back at the refuge and we were on our way to Lao.

We organised our visas for Lao at the Thai border town of Chiang Khong when we arrived. It was all very simple and only took as long as we spent eating our pad thai.

As the Mekong River acts as a natural border the crossing its self just involves paying a fee and having your passport stamped on one side, jumping in a long boat crossing to the other side and doing the same.

The border town on the Lao side is a dump, everything was over priced, the place we stayed at was cheap but they were constantly trying to scam everyone, everything from their offer to change currency, internet access and food & drinks for sale was dodgy. The room itself however was cheap; it was the equivalent of about $3Aus for the 2 of us for the night. We had a thin mattress each on the tiled floor, rectangular hard foam pillow and sometimes running water in the communal bathroom with the manual flush, non western toilets. We ended up going to bed at 6pm and had banana’s and water for dinner so we didn’t have to go back out, we also slept in our clothes which we also wore the next day as we didn’t want to open our bags.

As for the town it self there is a nice looking temple at the top of the hill, with friendly monks. Besides that there isn’t much, just a free wake up service at 4am performed by the monks. We believe it was drums calling them to mass, but for the uneducated Farang passing through town, it sounded eerily like war drums calling to be on the ready for anything.

Given that we were up early and already wearing our attire for the day, we quickly brushed our teeth out the window, and headed off to catch the boat which would carry us down the mighty Mekong to Luang Prabang. Luckily we were in the first group to arrive at the boat, which gave us the privilege of having a car seat to sit on whilst those that followed had wooded benches or plastic chairs.

The journey down the Mekong started out lovely, clear and tranquil, after a couple of hours though it became apparent that we were going to be traveling through some freaky low cloud. The temperature dropped by at least 15 degrees and the mist, rain and wind started. Everyone was trying to get below the sides of the boat and using whatever they could to warm up, twice the visibility got that bad that the captain took the boat behind the rocks near the shore for shelter. Trace was convinced that we were going to be attacked by pirates.

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