OUR JOURNEY

 21st Nov 2019 / Laos

Day 18 - Earthquake!

Photo: Contraband from Thailand?

6.49 am, the bed started moving and the curtains were swaying slightly, it was a gentle rocking. I got up to see why, Gaby woke up because of the movement. Our bed is rock solid so I could only put it down to an earth tremor. I checked online and there was just a 6.1 magnitude earthquake registered on on the USGS website. It was felt as far away as Bangkok in Thailand and Hanoi in Vietnam, but no damage reported We were about 70 kms from the epicenter.

We were now up and out of bed so we packed for our journey back to Huay Xai. We had purchased the bus tickets through hotel as the bus station was 8km away. Although it cost quite a bit more, it included the taxi ride to the bus station.

Our bus back was a lot different to the sleeper bus we had on the way here. It was just a small local bus with limited leg room. The journey was uneventful, but the scenery was stunning.

On arrival we squashed in the back of a pickup taxi with the locals for the 5km ride to town and were dropped off outside our hotel.

Boarder towns are not renowned to being terrible special and this one was no exception. Our hotel was the most basic on our trip yet and they probably hasn't cleaned under the bed since the late 90's! It even came with two gecko climbing around on the bedroom walls.

We headed out for some lunch then walked along the main street to the 'dock'... the end of the road where the boats moored. We are to take a boat from here tomorrow. I took some photos of the tourist boats then walked a bit further and took some photos of the locals boats unloading cargo that had possibly (illegally?) crossed the river from Thailand. I was soon approached by an official looking man in dark blue uniform. He told me I couldn't take photos and made me delete the photos I had taken... does he not know images can be recovered from the bin in Google photos? Blog photo is one of the deleted photos... nothing special

We relaxed for the rest of the afternoon on the hotel terrace and watched the sun set over the hills above the Mekong River.