One Step into Laos

After spending an evening and morning in Chiang Rai, I took a bus two hours away to the Mekong River and Chiang Khong to cross the border into Laos.

It was very dramatic. I stopped at a hole-in-the-wall office in Thailand and told them I was leaving, then climbed down the sandy bank of the Mekong and clambered into one of these long-tail boats.

It took about 90 seconds to cross the mighty Mekong and suddenly find myself in another country.

Apparently they're planning to build a bridge at this border crossing. It should be finished in 2012. I saw no sign of it.

But in any case, I was eating Larb Gai and drinking Beer Lao and watching the sun set over the hills of Thailand an hour after I left it.

A few things made it immediately apparent to me that I was in Laos:

• The woman who ran the guesthouse I stayed at for the night was hysterical. She was truly funny. Thais think everything is funny, but very few of them actually are. 
• At the restaurant where we ate dinner ("we" here being me and my then-new friend Monique, a Dutch girl I met at the border office)  we had to track someone down to order what we wanted. In Thailand the server stood over you before you ordered, sometimes unnervingly. Once we had our food, we never saw any of the staff again- literally. When we were finished and wanted to leave we tried without luck to find someone to take our money. We tried again the next morning. Nope. Sorry, Mekong Sunset Restaurant.