Becpowell's travel blogs:
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My Lao skirt's first outing
Entry 3 of 9 | show all | print this entry |
Day 38 - Woke up in the middle of the night with "chronic itching of the legs"! Got my coffee fix for the day (the lao coffee is soooo sweet - they put condensed milk in it instead of cows milk - yum!). Another falang joined me who happened to have offered me a ride on his scooter the day before (and I had declined, only to see him tearing off into the distance..accident waiting to happen!) and all he did was bang on about how he'd been to a village that no other foreigner had been to before and that I would never have that experience blah blah blah - too early for this rubbish! I then walked to the market to pick up my skirt, bumped into Ong on the way and got the 8am minibus back to Luang Nam Tha. It was crazy busy! I gave up my seat for a woman with a baby and ended up sat on a small plastic chair (what we'd call a childs chair back in England) in the aisle amongst the locals! At one point I counted 35 people crammed into this 18 seater minibus!
At Luang Nam Tha I got a connection straight to Udomxai which is the northern crossing point to other provinces. The road was rough! Although it had once been tarmaced, most of the top layer had worn away revealing hardcore and potholes, and the minibus drivers don't like to slow down too much! The bus stopped a few times on request as travellers got off to trade / collect friends / have a smoke and there were two blokes drinking lao lao a lot of the way - I hoped the driver hadn't but you really can't tell! The bus to Nong Khiaw, which is where I wanted to end up, only went once a day at 9am, and so I checked into a hostel at Udomxai and took my new skirt for a spin!
Udomxai is a major town for trade between China, Laos and Thailand but hasn't got a lot else to appeal! I wandered around the market selling a lot of cheap Chinese crap and walked further to a food market where I stopped at a road trolley for some noodle soup (and another traveller called Sasha befriended me). The place seemed really friendly and I noticed already that the lao skirt was getting a lot of attention! I don't think they see many falang wearing one - but I didn't think it was that noticeable!
I walked back to the hostel and when I was within 5 minutes of it there was yet another thunderstorm (yes, this is Laos' dry season!)
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