Day 57

I was awake on the sleeper bus for most of the early hours. I arrived in Jinghong at 6am and realised I needed a new plan - my last plan was just to get to Jinghong. I'd heard travellers say some nice things about Jinghong but I decided to push through and get to the border.

1 Our bus being overtaken

I got a 7.20 mini-bus from Jinghong to Mengla. That was a five hour trip and the bus was full (as all buses seem to be in China) with people and cargo. Just like the sleeper bus I was the only westerner on board but that was ok - I'm meant to be alone now remember! At 12.30pm we arrive in Mengla - it's a small town that serves only as a bus-switching place. It has two bus stations and of course I needed both for my switch. As I was gathering my things I heard a tout outside shouting "you want go to border" and I thought "yep, but I'm determined not to use you". The guy however was a bit more helpful and I decided I would use his pedicab to get to the new bus station as I was tired and didn't fancy navigating another new place. He charged my 10 yuan for the trip and let me know that he could change money for me too. It's easy to reject this kind of offer but I didn't know what I was going to do with all my yuan or where I was going to get any Lao Kip from. I gave him 200 yuan and trusted him to give me a decent rate - later on I got a better rate but his rate did not take too much of a liberty. He got me on my bus to the border and I thanked him and vice versa.

2 Mengla to Mohan scenery

I got to the border town of Mohan at around 1pm, it's a really quaint town with one main road. The sun was beating hard and I realised that this was going to be the typical Laos weather too. The last 10 days had been spent at altitude so it wasn't very hot during that time, this new weather was nice. I changed the rest of my Yuan with a street seller at an improved rate and took my passport into the immigration office for my departure stamp. After that was done, I walked through a checkpoint and into a brand new country. Well, it was actually no-man's land as the little Lao border town of Boten was still 2km around the corner.

3 Crossing the border

I got to the Lao immigration office and the whole place had a different feel about it. Much more relaxed and I strolled up to the desk and started filling in my particulars to get my visa on arrival. I now had nearly one million Lao Kip on me so it was very distressing to part with 380,000 of it just for the entry visa! Seriously, there is one cash point in Lao, it's in the capital city of Vientiane which is a 24 hour bus ride away. The cash will be a problem if I can't find a bank who will give an advance on a visa card!

The bus station in Boten was also a relaxed affair, a few small buses and a little hut/waiting room where the other passengers and ticket man were. The ticket man told me the bus to Nam Tha wouldn't be leaving for another hour. I had chosen Nam Tha as it was the first "decent sized place on the way to Loung Prabang - my next destination. I wanted to end my 24 hours of travelling at Nam Tha and get some rest. The ticket man had been writing something on a piece of paper for me - it read: "Dear foreigner, another foreigner walked down the road this morning. If you see him shout him on the bus". He'd written it because he was more comfortable writing English than speaking it but his spoken English was ok in the end. So it turned out that another traveller had not realised this was the bus station at all but continued down the road into Laos. There was nothing for miles but dense jungle and this road so I could understand the man's concern - he had been distracted with another customer at the time and couldn't stop the traveller himself. He wanted me to keep an eye out and get the guy on our bus if I saw him. No problem I thought, you can count on me.

As we waited for the bus (the departure time really since the bus and sleeping driver were already there) the ticket man asked me to help him read a poster on the station wall. It was written in English and we spent the next half hour going through each word and other related words as he got to grips with the poster's meaning. I had gotten to grips with the meaning a lot earlier and found it disconcerting to be teaching English using a missing persons poster as learning material!

The bus departure time came and only then did the driver and I start loading the bus up with a pregnant woman's worldly possessions. I don't know how she got there with them as she was alone, but she was very grateful of the help. The scenery for the next hour was wonderful - rubber plants, trees, villages, it was really great and I knew the Laos experience was going to be very different from China.

We got to Nam Tha at 4pm and I found a guesthouse to stay in - the "Many Ghan" it wasn't great but I took it anyway and walked around the town to see who I could find. I turned up an alley to find a more secluded guesthouse with a western guy and a beer out front. I joined him and I ended up having dinner with him and his girlfriend later that night - they're another Dutch couple this time from Eindhoven.