Laos

So we made it to Laos. This morning we got up, met up with J&J and took a rather authentic-looking three-hour bus to the border town. During the drive I had some of my last looks at Thailand and also some of my favorites. When we took the bus from Chiang Mai to Chiang Rai most of the trip was at night and it was almost all through mountainous hills. On this ride we passed through a lot of small towns and farmland. There were a lot of really beautiful vistas. The towns, where a lot of new building seems to be going underway, had many bright, new-looking, beautiful homes. I realized, while looking at them, how rather drab Korea can be. Seoul is lit up with a lot of bright lights but when a building is erected the color of choice seems to be generally some variety of steely gray. Even America, where sometimes eccentric individuals paint their houses blue or pink or something, couldn't have rivaled some of these places. There were really some beautiful colors out there. Of the new buildings, the plainest ones were stark white with red roofs. But some of the others were blue and pink and green and all colors mixed up together in trims. Some places had blue fences or a yellow porch or intricate bright red detail on the eves. It was pretty cool.

There were rice paddies dominating the landscape between the small towns. These places were like oceans of bright, bright green punctuated with little open-air huts which I assume were either for storing rice or for people to rest.

Somewhere along the way there was this huge mountain just jutting straight out of the ground. In the distance ther were some other mountains but they looked like normal ones, gently rising out the landscape. This one mountain just stuck up, almost at right angles, from the ground. It was startling to see the bright green, hyper-flat expanse of the rice paddies broken by this huge mound, dark-green with tropical vegetation or black with rock. It was a weird thing to see.

At the border town we passed through what was just about the easiest international crossing I have ever been to. On the Thai side a guy just took our passports and stamped them, gave us a smile, and sent us on our way. Then we took a boat for 40 baht over to the Laos side. These boats were also rather authentic looking and I'll get up some pictures eventually...

On the other side we sat on ceramic picnic tables at a lovely open-air sitting area while we filled out our visa applications. We got our passports stamped and our Laos visa added in, changed our baht into kip (the currency of Laos, 1 USD is approximatly equal to about 8500 kip) and went off to find a hostel.

After finding a hostel and eating we took advice from our Lonly Planet travel guide and hired a tuktuk out to a remote village some distance South (I think) from the border town. This proved to be a rather interesting idea. The tuktuk we hired happened to semi-breakdown two times on our way to the village. Regardless we saw some interesting sights on the way. The first time it broke down we happened to be at a spot on the road overlooking the river between Thailand and Laos which was an amazing view. As we got farther into the country we saw more farms with cows and rice fields. We saw a kid driving a motorbike who couldn't have been older than maybe 10 or 11 with who was probably his little brother on the back. We kind of laughed when we saw him and he kind of laughed back at us but looked very proud of himself at the same time.

Going to the village was a mistake which also made it perplexing as Lonely Planet hasn't steered us the wrong way yet. The place was interesting enough but it was, and was nothing else, a village. The people there stared at us as if to ask "what are you doing here?" and from the moment we pulled in, we felt like we were intruding. There are places which are built for tourists and places which aren't. I felt bad shoving ourselves into this little town. I feel like having tour groups run bus through Stevensville, MI poking their heads in the grocery store and school to gawk at people would have been similar to what these people felt. As I said, it was interesting, however, but be left pretty promptly. At least the drive was relaxing.

Tomorrow we are getting up early and then heading out for the pier for the slow boat.