6,5 hours. It's not much at all in Asia in travel time. That's what it took to reach Luang Namtha from Luang Prabang with our minivan. Compared to travelling in Finland 6,5 hours is alright here. Somehow time doesn't feel the same everywhere, or maybe it's just the attitude towards the time and place. In Asia you don't want to stress yourself when you travel as much as 15 hours straight, because you know reaching places takes more time here - if you're not travelling by plane that is. And then again you'd reach the central part of Finland by now, which feels like a long way to go, half the country! But when you travel for hours everything's alright as long as the bus has a toilet or you make stops along the way. Because the minivan had no toilet we made two stops along the way.
It was raining the whole day, so the mountain road was in a very bad condition with landslide areas. Huge mud puddles had stopped some cars and people were pushing them. We got pretty close to pushing our car too, as the driver made some crazy moves straight into the huge puddles nearly capsizing the van, and even drove near the verge of the mountain road. We were driving about 15 km/h, because the road was so bad. We were afraid of more landslides, but luckily everything went well.
Our minivan was mainly packed with tourists. When some of them left the driver soon filled the seats by picking up random local people along the way in need of a ride. Our van was so crammed we could hardly move during the trip. This pick-up system seems to work much better than the Western transport system with timetables and bus stops and is used in many Asian countries. It has its disadvantages too, like the non-existent timetables and over packed cars. You never know when the bus will arrive and if there's seats left, so sometimes you might wait for a long time for a ride.
Luang Namtha is a very small city, which mainly attracts the trekking and nature lovers. We didn't have time for those, as we were supposed to be out of Laos in three days, so we just relaxed and stayed for two nights. Our hotel seemed like a nice place at first, but turned out it had a lot of mosquitos and that wasn't all. When I woke up one morning I noticed that the bed bugs had been eating my leg! We didn't bother to change the hotel, as we only had one more night before leaving LN.
The curfews in Laos also applied here. The hotel rules adviced tourists to be back in the hotel by ten p.m. At some places you can't enter the hotel anymore, if you arrive too late. People have literally slept outside because of this, even if they had a reservation and knew the hotel staff!
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| View from our hotel. We were surrounded by mountains again with nature everywhere. |
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| Fish aquarium at our hotel |
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| Laos also has a water festival. |
We had a very interesting dinner in a Canadian owned restaurant called Forest Retreat Bamboo Lounge next to the Dokchampa hotel. I ordered a pizza with local vegetable toppings called a "jungle pizza". The waiter said the toppings change each day, depending on what they can find from the jungle. So we waited impatiently to see what they're going to serve me. After a thirty minute wait I had a pizza in front of me that looked like it had either fish or chicken on top of it, but it didn't smell like either of them. We asked the waiter what it was and he said the name for the vegetable, but we forgot what it was.
Steve tried it at first just in case it was meat, and turns out this veggie was hot! Then Kari tried it and made the same remark, now both guys turning more red from their faces each minute and laughing. This veggie was truly hot, as these guys can handle hot food! One might've thought this veggie was something suspicious, as the guys were having so much fun eating it. Jemma and me were laughing at the red guys, but they still wanted to eat more of it. As I can't handle hot food I let them pick that stuff out of my pizza and let them enjoy their weird fun. I then ate the rest of the pizza which was good, although expensive. The next day we returned to this restaurant, as Kari wanted to have his own jungle pizza, but they didn't have the same veggie anymore.
The restaurant charged extra from tea bags and cheese, as milk products aren't really used in Asia. Tea in Laos is a weird concept. You need to order the tea bag seperately unless you're having Lipton tea, which can usually be found everywhere. All the special local teas with mint, ginger, etc only include the herb and hot water, it's very plain. We also ate lunch in a local restaurant at the opposite side from the hotel. It was very popular, cheap and the food was good.
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| Forest Retreat Bamboo Lounge |
LN had some dog packs roaming the streets. They were very friendly and streetwise and usually searching for food and playing with each other. There were also birds sleeping and nesting in our hotel, so we could watch them from close. The surrounding jungles bring a lot of birds to the city.
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| One dog pack on the main street |
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| We missed the night market |
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| Electric motorcycle |
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| We had no complains ;) |
On Saturday morning we left LN. Steve and Jemma also left to Thailand. We still got to hang out together for a while at the bus station, where we all waited for our busses to leave. We were very excited to go to China again, although a bit nervous how we will manage there again with just a few learned Chinese sentences Julie taught us and wrote on papers. Also knowing how rude the Chinese can be was not something we were looking forward to.
We took a local bus from LN to China, and it took 6 hours to get to our destination. We stopped three times on the way, first at the border of Laos in Boten city, which we reached in 45 minutes, then at the border of China and later elsewhere in China.
Boten city in Laos is about one kilometer from the border of China and has renminbi as the main currency. There's casinos, large hotels and shopping malls. The Boten Special Economic Zone (BSEZ), mostly funded by Chinese enterprises, transformed the undeveloped city. Because gambling is illegal in China the people cross the border to Laos to gamble. However, for the Lao people it is also illegal to gamble in their own country, so they also go elsewhere to gamble - if they have the money. Boten is considered as China, because Mandarin Chinese is widely spoken there and the majority of the population is Chinese.
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| Bus station in LN |
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| Boten International Customs checkpoint. Are there other customs this fancy out there? |
The Boten checkpoint's golden building is financed mainly by Chinese and cost over 400,000 euros to build. We've never seen anything like it at any borders. Asia never stops to amaze. This customs went fast and also the Chinese customs at Mohan port, although we did have to step outside of the bus with all of our bags and walk through the customs building with them. Before that I had to search a bathroom though and hope that the bus won't leave without us in the meantime. Because we couldn't understand what the bus driver was saying to the passengers we had to follow what everyone else was doing and now some passengers went to search the bathroom.
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| Mohan port in China, near Laos border. |
We stopped for lunch for 45 minutes at a city in China I forgot the name of. The driver knew exactly where to find his lunch and disappeared fast out of sight, while we walked around and only saw one small shop that didn't have much to offer for us, so we just grabbed some small and unhealthy snacks. Our trip towards the city of Jinghong (Xishuangbanna prefecture, Yunnan) was full of beautiful sceneries. There were lush green forests everywhere, high hills and curvy roads. Everything looked well taken care of and clean.
By passing through the endless amounts of mountain tunnels China has our travel time shortened. The last half an hour of the trip was interesting, as we were only descending. Jinghong lies 558 meters above sea level and we descended from about 1,100 meters fast! It locked the ears like being in an airplane. The altitude differences were incredible, we could see such huge drops down from our street to other streets below us that it made your head dizzy. The other roads were so far down that they seemed to be on another planet. Because of these altitude differences in the high curvy mountain roads China has built frequent escape roads next to the main roads where a driver can steer his car in case of an accident. Seeing these roads eased our minds too, as the roads can sometimes feel really crazy. A river followed our road somewhere far below, sometimes escaping our eyes for ages and then coming back to view. The river was so far below, that it made us feel like we were driving on top of the world.
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| Lush green hills of Yunnan |
Next blog: Jinghong (Xishuangbanna, Yunnan), China.
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