Laos - Easter 2007, Beijing to Mengla

This April, my boyfriend and I travelled to Laos. Initially, we were planning on going to Cambodia, but I somehow got sidetracked in the planning. I will never regret it though, Laos is a country unlike any other I've visited, and I would recommend it to anyone.

We got up before the sun in Beijing (you do not see the Beijing streets this void of cars or people very often), April 7th, to go to the airport for our first leg of transport, to Kunming. Kunming is the capital of the Yunnan province in China, and a rather normal chinese city. I'd been there before, and had seen the stone forest and the other attractions in the area. Erlend had never seen the place, nor did he get to this time around as we only stayed in the airport waiting for our transfer to Jinghong, in the Xishuangbanna prefecture.

Beforehand, we were not sure whether we would have to stay a night in Jinghong, or if we would be able to transfer on to Mengla by bus the same day. All the resources we found on the internet told us the last buses left around 14:00, and as our flight arrived around 14:30 we were prepared to spend the night in this city that neither of us had any previous attachement to. However, when we landed and rushed on to the southern bus station (bring a guide book description of the China-Laos route through Mengla and show it to a taxi driver), there was still at least one more bus, and we got on it.

Reading about Laos and the road conditions there, we were prepared that we might be in for a bumpy ride. The transport leg between Jinghong and Mengla might have been the scariest part if you ask Erlend, though! Chinese drivers are not very safe in general, and bus drivers are crazy. As it turns out, southern minibus drivers are the craziest of all, and the roads are rather horrible. I had however taken a motion sickness pill, and stayed calm for the duration of the bus trip :)

I loved the bus ride, we saw a China I have not seen since my round trip in 2004. Yunnan is a tropical province, and the flora is very different from that of the Beijing area. On the first half of the ride a little boy was sitting on the other side of the aisle from Erlend, carrying a net of baby turtles. In the back, the local men were smoking, spitting and snoring - business as usual. Towards the end of the trip, the thunder storm of the century broke loose, and I'm amazed the driver could see anything through the carpet of water that was blocking his view.

We got to Mengla around 20:00 in the evening, and the city turned out to be of as little interest as all guide books had promised. We found a fast food place serving chicken burgers, and had a beer at a local roof top bar. The hotel was right across the street from the northern bus station (you go out the gates, and it's on the other side of the street, about thirty meters down the road), and not very good. It was, however, cheap and clean enough to not panic.

Definitive song of the day: The Fray - How To Save A Life