We Are Far Behind On This. Chiang Rai- Laos.

With two days to spare and only about 100kms to go, we took our sweet, sweet time to get out of Thailand. Sweet corn stands turned to watermelon stands and when we finally stopped for some, the nice lady wouldn't stop cutting open watermelons until charlie started throwing up watermelon. We stopped early in the evening after Charlie and Kyle were lured with the promise that the worlds smallest town, and accompanying world's smallest carnival, might offer girls to dance with. The enticing girl had a word growth under her ear so I wasn't to excited about the prospects. However, the town was quiet and it had an amazing waterfall and the local teacher let us camp in the grass in front of his school. He checked in like 4 times over the next 14 hours to make sure his school was treating us ok.

Night comes incredibly early in these little Thai towns and by 6:30 everything is usually shut down. After a dinner of soup and a bag of free mangoes. We headed to the aforementioned free carnival. The dancing girl set-up was awesome!!! For 20 baht you could go on stage, a stage surrounded by staring thais, and pick a girl/really-old-woman-in-gogo-boots and dance kind of close to her fro two crazy thai country songs. We of course went for that. Charlie was forced to dance with the weird growth girl, but I got a fat girl in a hello kitty t-shirt. I totally scored. The dancing festivities were followed by a kick-boxing match, which was more of fight to the finish by two local kids. The one kid got finished... really, really finished. He had a hair-lip which made me feel extra bad for him after he lost. The girls seemed to like him though.

On to laos we went, and crossed the mighty mekong around 3 pm. By the time we got things sorted out and I once again became a kipanaire, it had gotten late and we decided to stay in the crappy river town. We pitched our tents, once again in a school yard, and awoke to find my super sweet red chuck taylors stolen. They were very sweet and now they are very stolen. We slogged 75 kms and and stumbled into the drunkest town in laos around 4 pm. If you've ever traveled in Laos, you'll understand this is quite a distinction. They let us set up camp next to a river and also let all one million village children stare at us the whole time. By the time we got our tent up we realized we were going to have a rough time finding food do to the drunkness of the village. We find a nice sober lady and she cooked us up some tasty dinner.

"Why is everyone in this village so, so very drunk."

"Oh we have a new wall."

"You are throwing a party for a wall."

"It's a very nice wall. It's a beautiful wall. I'll take you to our new wall."

And off we went to the wall. It was a nice wall, but not a beautiful and certainly not a wall deserving two seperate parties. We were once again offered copious amounts of gasoline smelling liquor and I ate some pickled water buffalo skin.

The evening came quick and the village had no electricity so we were tucked in and sleeping tight by 7 pm.