Traveling to the border

We are taking our time checking out this morning - we have our room in this beautiful garden until 11, we have big bowls of muesli to keep us full and happy, and we don't have to be anywhere too fast. We are taking the local bus to Chiang Khong, located just on the border that Thailand shares with Laos. We will be cruising down the Mekong on a slow boat tomorrow, and want to stay as near as possible to make crossing in the morning quick and painless.

The local bus is a lot of fun. It's wild and bumpy, the windows and doors are left open for the whole trip to allow for a cooling breeze, there are women touring the bus station selling all manners of snacks for the 2-hour ride. We buy green mango with spicy sugar for dipping. We come by early to make sure that 1 - we have a seat on the bus, and 2 - our bags have a seat on the bus. Sometimes these buses can get really full, and what we don't want is for our bags to end up riding on the roof or something! We sprawl out in the back seat, to which one woman laughs, tells us the ride is more bumpy back here. Just before we pull out of the bus station, a tall bearded backpacker wearing a Blue Jays hat climbs on and joins us in the back. "Oh no, Toronto." I murmur, to which he laughs - he's actually from California, but worked for a few years in Toronto. Loves Montreal, even worked down in the area of Saint-Hyacinth and "Three Rivers", he says. We spend the rest of the trip chatting about travel with him, about visas and experiences, and snack on the crunchy green mango and bananas we brought. Two hours later, we part ways in Chiang Khong at the border to Laos, as he is on day 30 of his Thai visa, and has to get out of the country. We wish him well, and maybe we'll cross paths again in Laos.

We disembark at Tesco, the BIG grocery/everything market in town, and our pick-up point for our next guesthouse. Coincidentally, we are 5 people waiting in the parking lot, for the Same guesthouse pick-up! Hopefully we all fit in the car! Our host shows up, laughs and succeeds in squeezing us, and all our gear, into the back of her SUV, and away we go, bumping down the dusty farm roads. We pull into this brightly-coloured little compound, 5 pastel-tinted houses all in a row, in the middle of a rubber tree plantation, surrounded by vegetable gardens, and within sight of the Thai-Laos Friendship bridge. It's a little corner of paradise in the middle of an ever-changing location. The new bridge has brought better trade opportunities, for Thailand and Laos, but also with China, and that has brought some serious investment and construction VERY close to the Panna Kalong guesthouse. Hopefully it doesn't completely ruin the wonderfully peacefully atmosphere we are enjoying here!

Our host, Phrajan Dtemduaang, which stands for full moon, lets us pick a colour of house(I jump on the purple one!), offers us a tasty lunch of spicy minced pork and green beans with steamed rice, and tells us she will make us dinner too, asking if we like Pad Thai, green curry, and pumpkin. Finding these option all delicious, we agree and decide to take a walk through the dried-out rice fields and rubber trees. A haze rises over the mountains across the Mekong river, the farmers of Laos are burning their fields this evening. The sun sets just as we are returning to the cute little compound for the evening. Our fellow guests from the bus and Tesco parking lot join us, and we sit around the large table in the yard, while our host parades platter after platter of plates of food from her home, just next door, to us. It turns out, when she mentioned the options for dinner, it wasn't a choice - she was listing off the dishes she wanted to prepare for us! So for dinner, we devour green pork curry, pumpkin sauteed with egg, stir-fried chicken, pad thai with shrimp AND steamed rice, with a plate of fresh fruit to finish off the meal. Not wanting to insult our host, Mario and I did a more-than-respectable job of finishing all our dishes, and then rolled back to our bed, to fall into yet ANOTHER food coma this trip!