Got up about 9:00, had an excellent American breakfast at the Coconut Restaurant, where we bought our trek and Laos tickets, bought some snacks for our 5 hour bus ride to Chaing Khong, at the Laos border.
As we were packing our stuff, Court remarked that she doesn't mind living out of a backpack...she thought it would bother her, but she's so used to it now, she's fine with it.
Mini-bus picked us up. It's a very rough road, paved, but very bumpy, and the mini-bus didn't have ANY shocks in the back, where Court and I were sitting. Near the end of the trip, the mini-bus was making very strange noises when he shifted gears (deja vu...same thing on that night bus earlier on!) I didn't think the mini-bus was going to make it, I kept expecting the rear end of the van to fall out onto the road.
Mini-bus stopped at the Namkong Guest House in Chaing Khong. All they had left was a 3 person room for 120 baht, so we took it. Cheap!
We booked the slow boat to Louang Phabang (or Louang Prabang, depending on the book you read). The slow boat is a 2 day boat ride down the Mekong River. The other option is a fast boat, which gets you there in one day, about 7 hour ride. I'll talk about the fast boat in a future journal, though.
The guest house we were at was advertising an "ultimate Siam hammock" or somesuch thing. It's a hammock, with mosquito net, a pup tent for soft surfaces, another kind of tent for hard surfaces, and also a "suspended bed". Of course, it has rain protection built-in as well. We are going to use it to do some camping (camping is free on the beaches of some islands, especially national parks islands). We paid 1350 baht for it.
Chaing Khong, from what little we've seen of it, is a very nice city, the main street runs along the Mekong river for many kilometres.
Also bought the Rough Guide for Laos at a bookstore. Somebody told us the Lonely Planet for Laos was pathetic.
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