Saturday, 1 December 2018

Day 245 - Huay Xai - Luang Namtha

After a long & decent sleep, we woke feeling hungry & excited to move on to the next place. We're heading 187 kilometres north east through the Nam - Ha National Bio Diversity park. We're staying in a small town on the outside of the national park called Luang Namtha.
We set off for breakfast at a local cafe. While there we notice that they are displaying a sign for selling bus tickets. We've already done our research & know what time the bus leaves & how much tickets are.

The cafe owner surprises us with his offer that includes transport from our hotel to the bus station. 
His price is 90,000 Kip each & we know the bus ticket is 60,000. The unknown for us & the bartering point will be the took took, if we did it ourselves.
The 90,000 seems very reasonable & saves us the inconvenience of organising a took took, so we agree. At 11am, the cafe owner picks us up from the hotel in his 2 door Kia & drives us to the station. He helps us with our bags & gives us plenty of recommendations for our time in Laos. What a champion! 


The bus is running late, for whatever reason & instead of leaving at 11.30am, we left at 12.30pm. 
Lucky we're on holiday & running on Laos time!  At 3.15pm we stopped at the halfway point according to distance, not time. We're definitely not going to be arriving at 4.30pm, at the predicted 4 hour transit time. 

Surprisingly we did arrive just before 5.30pm. The 2nd half of the journey was all down hill & went by quickly. What we didn't anticipate was the bus stop being 10km's out of town. 
We got out of the bus along with 2 other couples from Holland & France, then together we got one of the small ute's/took took's to take us into town. 

We checked into our accommodation with no problems & carted our packs up the 2 storeys of stairs to room 333. Straight after dumping our bags, we went back into the street to explore the town & find dinner. We went to a restaurant called the Bamboo Lounge.
Tom ordered a pizza & I got a roast vegetable salad. 



After dinner, we looked at a few bike rental places before going back to our accommodation to escape the ravenous mosquitos. 

- Alli

 After our first visit to the ATM in Laos, we are now millionaire's !!

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