into laos on july 14

we stayed a night in chiang khong, thailand, before crossing over to laos. we found a cute little hostel run by a thai woman who had a retired american boyfriend named don. the town was small and the restaurant had mediocre food, but there was this cute old lady across the street selling food. she sold us banana wrapped in sticky rice wrapped in a banana leaf. it was delicious. she also sold us something we couldn't identify but it had fruit in it i think. also it had a couple bugs on top. i'm becoming quite tough. i picked off the bugs and ate it anyway. it wasn't that good though.

the next morning we went to the border in the bed of the thai woman's pickup, the thai border is on one side of the mekong river, the lao border is on the other side. we got stamped out of thailand and then took a boat across the river into laos. i had to apply for a visa at the laos border. it took 15 minutes or so and cost $35. foo didn't need a visa. so it took her like 5 minutes and cost nothing. i'm always so expensive! so we were with 4 european guys and were going to take a tuktuk (like a taxi) to the bus station and a bus to a city called luang namtha. but we decided to hire a van instead which is a bit more expensive but much faster. so we get in the van, and turns out it's a karaoke van. so there are mirrors on the ceiling and walls with little led lights in them, and a tv playing karaoke music videos really loud, and huge speakers everywhere. it was kind of funny. til we started driving. the roads in laos are really winding. and there's construction in lots of places and potholes and gravel. and the driver was driving really fast (for a road like that) and there was a polish boy named kasper who was a bit loud and obnoxious. he asked if we could stop for food along the way because he was sooo hungry, so we stopped at one place and they brought out instant noodles and he was like 'oh i don't eat noodles. can we go someplace else?' mind you that this is rural laos. next place to eat is in an hour. so we go to the next place and there was no menu, but there were eggs, and of course noodles, and some rice. but the polish guy kept asking for salad. in his polish accent "i want a salad. do they have something like lettuce and some vegetable, like a tomato?" seriously? of course they're not going to have salad. anyway, he was loud and rude to the driver who didn't speak english that well, but kasper kept asking for other things. finally we got to luang namtha, and foo and i quickly departed from the group of boys. we found a guesthouse called khamking and stayed there for a night. we went to the night market to eat and got fried rice, some coconut noodle soup, a little waffle, and some crepes with deliciousness inside. the town has exactly one atm, which wasn't working, so we paid in thai baht for an exchange right slightly in the guesthouse's favor. we looked at trekking options (trekking, it turns out, basically means walk into the jungle/rural area and look at staged sights of local life/culture) , because it's supposed to be good around there, but the 'responsible trekking' was pretty expensive and didn't give much money to the hill tribes that we would visit. so the next day we went to muang sing, a town an hour north. we rode in an 11 passenger van with a vomiting child. i tried to give the mom some wet wipes we had with us, but i think that wet wipes don't exist in laos, because she didn't use them, but also didn't give them back. oh well. we got there and found a guesthouse, went to check out the trekking that was supposed to be the most responsible in southeast asia. it was wayyy more expensive, like 300,000 kip per person per day. that's like $35. and something like only 8% of it went to the tribes, and a huge chunk went to the government. and we read about all the different treks we could do, but decided that trekking is perhaps not a responsible method of tourism at all. no matter what, having all these relatively wealthy foreigners coming to a village to watch people do their normal daily tasks and taking photos and gawking is very strange. imagine if some rich foreigners came everyday to st charles MO to watch anne and mick zerr cutting their grass, going to work, washing the dishes. and they took pictures and talked about you in a language you didn't understand. it just doesn't seem right. so much exposure to tourists will change the culture. the highlight of muang sing was the chinese restaurant we ate at. ha. way to dive right into the lao culture, right?