March 12
We woke up early and got sandwiches from a little lady in the street. We met up with our German friend, Tim, who luckily said that the English asshole had food poisoning and wasn’t going to make the boat. We were all pretty happy about that. We walked to the boat early and got good seats. Unfortunately, the English guy pushed himself to make the boat right before it left. He sat behind us but we barely conversed with him the whole ride because he was very sick. The two Canadian guys took a bus north into the mountains. Matt, Tim and I hung out and played cards the whole way to Huay Xai, which is the town on the Laos side of the Thailand boarder. Most people on our boat wanted to make it there by 6:00 pm to beat the boarder closure but we were too late so everyone ended up having to spend the night in this small town. That means that the English guy went with us to find a hotel. This time, I told him pretty bluntly that it was best if we didn’t stay at the same hotel tonight. I said that us three were going to room together until gibbons. Hey, you win some, you lose some, and this guy lost this one. Tim, Matt and I got a room for three and went to get dinner at this small restaurant in someone’s house on the street. There was a cute baby in a crib watching us the whole time. Afterward, we went to our rooftop with some beer and hung out for an hour or two before we went to bed.
March 13
We slept in, for a change, which felt really good. It’s always a treat when we don’t have to wake up early. We ate breakfast at a sandwich place and then checked in at the Gibbon Experience office. They make you check in the night before for no reason, and since the slow boat gets in too late, you have to then come two days early like we did. Oh Southeast Asia, so inefficient. It’s the same thing with the ferry, because people get it just after the boarder closes. I don’t understand why the ferry doesn’t leave an hour earlier so then everyone is happy. It just makes sense. After checking in, we walked up to a temple and monetary. Some monk in the temple sings/screams the same two verses pretty much all day long. It got really annoying because they blast it over the load speaker so the whole town hears it all day, every day. I understand that it’s for religious purposes, but damn, 6:00 am until 9:00 pm without any breaks, come on now. We learned that there are going to be bees at one of the tree houses during Gibbons, so we decided to get bee medicine, which was “right down the road” according to our hotel guy. After 45 minutes of walking, we finally got to the pharmacy, which consisted of one ten year old boy and no adults in sight. We asked if his father or mother were there and he just stared at us with his jaw dropped and shook his head no. We didn’t want a kid prescribing us the wrong medicine because he didn’t know what the picture of a bee was, so we walked back 45 minutes to our town. We ate lunch at a riverside restaurant and we were the only people there. This was kind of a ghost town with like 20-30 tourists a day actually spending the night, so we recognized most other tourists by the end of the day. After lunch, Tim and I got full body massages for an hour. It hurt, but felt good after. I kept kicking the girl and laughing whenever she touched my feet. I loved the back massage, because that is the part of me that needed this most. It was very loose for the first time in two months. We then went back to the hotel to chill for a little before going to dinner at this really cool chilled out Eco place with a bon fire and organic food. I got a pizza that was really good. We met this Brazilian guy and Dutch girl who were going to be on the Gibbon Experience with us tomorrow so we talked to them for a while until the restaurant closed and we wall parted to sleep before the big day.
