Float down the Mekong River- the beginning

So we have left Yunnan Province for the first time since arriving in China 6 months ago. China is on holiday for the upcoming Spring Festival and we have decided to use the time to explore the Lower Mekong Basin. We started out with a series of bus trips- a 10-hour very comfy sleeper from Kunming to Xishuangbanna, a 7am jaunt to the sleepy town of Mengla, a very crowded minibus to the tiny Chinese border town, Mohan, and back onto a big bus- for five minutes until we reach the Lao border. And all this before noon! Exhausted from our travels, we fell asleep once over the border and awoke to realize we had missed our stop in the northern Lao town of Nam Tha. By the time we realized our mistake, we were two hours west, heading to the Thai border. We were disappointed, as we had looked forward to doing some hiking in Nam Tha, but like good travelers we turned our frowns upside down and let the road take us where it may, which in this case turned out to be the Lao-Thai border town of Houayxai... well almost. The bus driver let us off about 5km from Houaixai and we hoofed it the rest of the way, ending over 24 hours of continual motion at a friendly guesthouse right on the Mekong. We spent a lazy day recovering from the full travel day by watching the steady stream of tourists cross the Mekong from Thailand. Everyone who enters Lao is greeted by a large poster listing all of the things that Westerners love to do that are offensive to Laos- like putting our feet on things, dressing scantily, PDA. We saw very quickly why us Westerners get a bad rap!

But the Laos are extremely patient and gracious hosts, thankfully. Ben and I spent a memorable evening at a Lao pre-wedding party. We had passed a thatch-roof open air bar full of locals that looked like they were having fun, barbequeing and playing music, so we stopped in and sat at an empty table. Immediately, a gregarious Lao approached us and invited us to eat and drink with his family. It turned out that the celebration was for his brother, who was getting married the next morning. As his brother had lived in Hangzhou for 5 years, we were able to communicate very well with him using Chinese. We have been really impressed by the excellent English we have heard here, but most members of the wedding party had only rough English. After leaving the wedding party, we stopped to take pictures of the sunset over the Mekong from the steps of a monastery. We saw a very small nun lugging huge bags up the steps, and after all the Chinese conversation at the wedding, my brain hadn't switched back to English, so I offered to help her, in Chinese. She spoke Chinese as well and Ben and I helped her up to her dorm with her bags. It was very nice getting to practice some Chinese!