Crazy/Beautiful

Getting to Laos was, well, an intereting process. A process I hope I don't soon have to repeat. Malewaan, the super friendly owner of the guest house, drove us to the dock where we had to stand in line to get stamped out of Thailand. Then we had to load onto a long-tail boat for the short 1 minute ride to the other side. We made it to Laos! Along with about 100 other farang. Seriously, where did all these people come from?!? They definitely were not in Chiang Khong....We got to Huay Xai in Laos and had to make our way through a mad crowd of people all waiting to get their visa on arrival. I have never seen such a disorganized system. There was no line or any direction whatsoever ( I guess I should be used to this coming from Thailand).   I had to fight my way through the crowd in order to shove my passport and paperwork through the window. Then we had to wait for them to return our passport with our Laos visa. The process took forever and it was serious chaos. Everyone was crowding the tiny office waiting for their picture to be shown in the window. Finally we got our passports and headed up the hill to catch a tuk-tuk to collect our ticket for the slow boat. We got on the boat and found the boat was filled with seats that you find in a mini-van. Interesting choice for a boat. We grabbed seats and watched as the huge crowd of people we had seen at the imigration office were all getting on the boat. I had a moment of panic as they continued to load people and luggage. Is everyone going to fit? Is this boat even going to float?  Finally we left, 2 hours after the boat was supposed to leave. Lukily the boat did not sink and I enjoyed a beautiful, but a little cramped, boat ride. We stopped for the night in a little town called Pak Beng and then got up super early to ensure we got better seats for the second half of the boat ride to Luang Prabang. They had two boats this time so it was a much more comfortable ride, until we hit a patch of rapids and a big wave hit the side of the boat and we got soaked! We made it to Luang Prabang!

 Although the boat ride and the entire process was a bit chaotic the scenary along the river was absolutely amazing. My favorite part was seeing some of the local people swimming in the river. They jumped up and down and waved to us as we passed by in the boat. :)