Chicken Bus!

On Friday, we traveled from Huay Xai to Luang Nam Tha, a 195-km (120 miles) trip that took us in the neighbourhood of 6 hours. Worth bearing in mind is that the travel time on this route has been vastly reduced by a thorough upgrading of the road over the past couple of years - formerly it was 8-10 hours, sometimes stretching into two days in the rainy season.

Laos is a good 50 years behind Thailand in terms of development. The bus station was a simple affair - a mud lot with some wooden benches.



The bus ride was an interesting if somewhat uncomfortable experience.



It became more interesting still when a family boarded a bus with their dinner for the next two days - in the form of a bag full of live chickens.




We stopped for a lunch of MSG soup with chicken and noodles. Instant headache. MSG is a popular ingredient in Laos, as explained on the "Food Guide to Luang Nam Tha," available at our guesthouse. For more on the perils of Chinese Restaurant Syndrome, see Wikipedia.




We finally arrived in Luang Nam Tha and set up a two-day trekking excursion to the Nam Ha National Protected Area, to leave the following morning.

A popular form of transport in and around Luang Nam Tha is these Chinese-made contraptions. I'm not even sure what they're called, but they are noisy and look uncomfortable as hell.



Finally, we found this sign pretty funny:



The sign has something to do with a program for distributing books to kids in remote villages. What that has to do with a mouse, we have no idea.