first day of Lao trip - Huay Xui

On Thursday morning Imogen and I caught the 6:30am bus to Chong Khong, a border city in Thailand. The bus took 7 hours and arrived around 1pm. There's no reason it should have taken 7 hours - Chiang Mai isn't that far away from the border - but it's a hilly drive and the old buses usually have to struggle up the steep grades very, very slowly. Sometimes it's an adventure to see if you'll make it up the hill. I felt like we were on the little bus that almost-could-not.

After we got to Chong Khong, we took a ferry across the Mekong River to Huay Xui, the border town in Laos.


We had to get little passport photos taken so that we could get a Lao visa.


The visa was US 35$ - expensive! Oh well. Then we decided to find lunch because we were starving. The green bus did not feed us cookies all day the way the bus to Mae Sai had two weeks earlier. So, lunch!



Both Chong Khong and Huay Xui are little border towns that wouldn't really exist if not as entry/exit points out of the country, so they are small and tend to cater to tourists. For example: I had a ham/cheese/garlic/tomato baguette for lunch. Not typical Lao cuisine by any stretch of the imagination.

After lunch we decided to explore what little city there was...

A view of Huay Xui from the river


The all-important gaming center in town


Jungle meets city


This ice cream flavor was called "happy summer." It tasted like....cotton candy, or banana taffy. I didn't really like it but I ate it anyway.

Finally we decided to go visit the temple. It was beautiful, as most temples in southeast Asia are. When we got to the top, we were surrounded by a bunch of Lao boys. At first I was anticipating that they were going to try to sell us something, but it turned out that they just wanted to practice speaking English! It was pretty cute. You can tell they learn very formulaic-ly, though, from books, because they can ask many questions, and understand your answers, but when you ask a question they don't know it throws them for a loop. Just for me to ask "What city are you from?" was really difficult. Miming may have been involved.

The view from below...so many temples are built on top of hills. Always takes some effort to get up!
I thought this was funny.


So pretty!




After our explorations, we returned to our cute little guesthouse, booked our tickets for the slow boat for the next day, and took a short nap. Well, I napped, anyway. When I woke up it was time for dinner, so we decided to go to a little Indian food place our guidebook recommended. It was so good! I hadn't yet had Indian food over here, but it became a theme of my Laos trip, as you'll see later.

Dinner was great, and we were tired, so we decided to forgo drinking and just have a coffee. We walked into town to try to find some people and lo and behold, we found people.

As you can probably tell, we ended up having a beer and then some. The Dutch guys were celebrating "surviving" their 3-day Gibbon experience, a trekking/ziplining/gibbon watching adventure where you sleep in treehouses 40m up from the ground, so they were getting a bit happy. Dayna and Trish, on the left, ended up becoming our traveling buddies for the next few days after our bonding experience on this night.

Everything closes really early in Laos, so this is all happening around 10pm. The little restaurant cleared the tables to the side so that we could dance. So we tried to dance to music that's just not meant for dancing (the Cranberries??) and generally had a great time.





By 11:30 they clearly wanted us out, so we left to go get some sleep before our slow boating adventure began on Friday!