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THE SLOW BOAT UP THE MEKONG...oh it sounds so romantic!!! Day OneThis time the nightmare border crossing is unavoidable. Vietnam Airlines have no flights available, neither has Bangkok Air or Thai Airlines our only option is to fly Laos Air and with their safety record (or lack of) it ain't happening... apparently Laos Air don't have a safety record because the don't feel obliged to publish it - shocking. So it all begins at about 6am when we pack up our stuff and await our rickshaw pick-up which is late... we give it five minutes and then decide we will just walk down to the boat bording place as we want to make sure we are some of the first people on the boat to get a decent seat. We arrive at the boat place and are shown to a different boat from the one we saw yesterday, but as this one is better we get on it along with a few other early people. They do exist, we are not the only geeks here. There are even SOFT seats on this one - basically a few old car seats but they are a lot more appealing than 9 hours on the wooden benches on the rest of the boat. So we can't believe our luck that for once our obsession with being the first people to check in for the transportation has worked a treat. We have only just finished congratulating ourselves when we are told that this boat is now not the boat we are sailing on and we have to move all our stuff onto the old knackered one next to it which is already filling up fast with people who have arrived just in time for the boat's departure - GGGrrrrrrrrrrr. Why bother! We end up with a seat together but basically we are the only people who were there early that don't end up with either a bench each or a soft seat, we are just so cr*p at bagging seats etc. Oh well... The rest of day one on the boat passes without a hitch: the scenery is interesting throughout and amazing in places; they serve tea and coffee on the boat; there is beer; we have food and most importantly there is a fairly clean western style loo.... nine hours later when we arrive at Huay Xai our bums are obviously very numb but we have had a fairly pleasant day and obviously a pretty unique experience, so although we are dead tired we are in fairly good spirits.... All pleasant thoughts disappear however when we moor just as dusk is turning into night and are faced with a gigantic sandy cliff which we have to climb up in order to get to the village where we will spend the night. There are hordes of children willing to help us carry our stuff up however we are aware that they charge 8 dollars for this help and besides if we are struggling to carry our bags it seems wrong to give them to a child under 10 yrs old! So we struggle up the hill, it is really really horrendous and then when we get into town it is pretty much uphill all the way to the guesthouses, with everyone running on ahead of each other trying to secure a room... in retrospect it is actually pretty funny but at the time it was definitely not fun. We eventually get a guesthouse which is pretty basic and at least double the price of what it should be but we are so worn out that we collapse on the bed - Sarah literally in tears from exhaustion! We're not even going to focus on the fact that we were supposed to be able to buy our ticket for the following day but the ticket office (if there is an actual 'office') didn't seem to be open so we couldn't buy our ticket out - instead let's just focus on the fact that we had a lovely dinner and a couple of beers Loas before crashing out for a few hours sleep. Day TwoWe awake and have to pack in the dark as there is no electricity in our guesthouse from 10pm to 7am, but during breakfast we get to see the monks doing their alms (where they go round collecting money from the villagers), which is very cool. We set off down to the boat place determined to get our tickets for the first boat out to the North. We join an unfeasably large queue which turns out not to be a queue for boats going North only those going South - it is only when we get to the front that we are told we buy our tickets on the boat. You can imagine that our tempers are wearing thin already. When we get down to the boats we see that where we were dropped last night was the worst possible place as there are actually steps up the sand cliff but instead they would rather attempt to kill a few soft Western tourists so that they can make a few dollars offering to carry their bags... all of this is not creating great final impressions of Laos! Eventually we get on a boat which is a floating piece of crap about 50% worse than the boat we were on yesterday... can't even begin to go into how horrific day two was but will summarise as follows... wooden benches which you can only fit one butt cheek on; stupid p*sssed up highly racist and annoying South African alcoholic giant man sat next to you drinking whisky from 9.30am for the whole journey and abusing everyone all day, oh and let us not forget his young friend (who Mark still regrets he didn't punch) some very spoilt horrific English guy who gave everyone a detailed account of his grotty little sex life for 2 hours in the afternoon; filthy dirty squat toilet; an 8 hour journey ending in border crossing into Thailand that evening which turns into 11 hour journey arriving at nightfall after the Thai border is shut, meaning another night in Laos and even less time in Chiang Mai!!! All in all it was probably our worst day of the trip so far, again in retrospect it was so awful that it is actually hilarious. Oh and we forgot to mention that we had to stay in the same hotel as the big racist guy and his oik of a mate. Thank god that someone did actually meet us off the boat and take us to a clean and cheap guest house or someone may have been killed! So for anyone reading this and still thinking about doing this trip...you have been warned. Day ThreeA great start - more travelling - so we are up early again and take a long tail boat across the Mekong river which crashes into a boat at the other side of the shore very nearly landing us and all our bags in the water as the boat collapses around us, we kid you not... Get us into Thailand sharpish. We then do passport control/visas to get into Thailand and with this sorted we are ferried to a cafe where we have to wait for an hour so that they can get breakfast money out of us before loading us onto the minibuses and taking us through to Chiang Mai. We meet a lovely couple on the bus who are going to India so we spend a pleasant day chatting to them about our time there. After 5 hours and a whole day late (plus the two that we 'lost' in Vang Vieng) WE EVENTUALLY ARRIVE IN CHIANG MAI!!!!!
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