On the river to Laos

These last few weeks have been interesting, to say the least. I'm getting more comfortable here and we are meeting lots of people. The cities are small and we keep running into everyone we meet. On Monday, we went to Doi Inthanon just outside of Chiang Mai... I posted pics on facebook a few days ago. It's the national park. It was mellow and a lot of driving around, at least in comparison to the trekking tour. The forest and waterfalls were beautiful and we took all too many pictures. Also Markus, whom we met trekking joined us.

Later we met for dinner and got 30 min foot massages for $1.50. We ran into a Finnish guy who was on the park tour too. Then we all went to a bar yay! Some Welsh girl got all together too drunk and fell down a flight of stairs landing straight on her head. So we all spent some time helping her out and convincing her friends to take her to a hospital. Hopefully she's ok. After the drama, we went to 7 11 and got some Chiang beers and hung out by the river.

The next few days we slept in and took advantage of the free wireless at the hotel. We saw more wats on Thursday, our last day in Chiang Mai and booked a border crossing to Laos. I t was a little dodgey, but since we had great times on the other tours we figured it would be alright. Unfortunately, the guy had lied to us and we got ripped off. We were supposed to get to Laos in 2 days by bus and slow boat with night accommodation included. We left Thursday night in a taxi, not a minibus as promised, for 6 hours to the border crossing in Chiang Khong. We selpt in a spider infested, dirt encrusted, smelly room by the border. When we woke up the guy told us 2 more days to Luang Prabang accommodation not included and a stop in Pak Beng. Oh well, nothing we could do. All in all we lost about $20, but since we are thinking in baht it seems like a heck of a lot. So we got breakfast, hassled with the exchange guy who wanted to over charge us for US dollars (they only take $ for Laos visas).

We were told we could pay by credit card so we had no baht to exchange. Alison and I hopped on the back of his son's motorbike 2.5 km without helmets to an ATM. Then we changed money, got visas and onto a rickety boat for 6 hrs to Pak Beng. We met some cool people on the boat and hopefully will have some more friends to travel with in Laos. Also on our boat was the New Zealand girl that I met on the bus from Bangkok to Chiang Mai. Southeast Asia is a small world.