Bye Bye Mundane Life!!: Chiang Mia & the journey to Laos

After such a hectic weeks worth of activities it was down for some retail therapy to finish our time in what is one of our favourite places to date in Asia. Enough of the touristy, overpriced annoying street sellars we took our friendly tourist operators advice and headed out of town to a proper local market 'for local people' and found the real deal! No ridicolus prices just acceptable and affordable goods that we took full advatage of buying ourselves a couple of daypacks (north-face and lowe alpine) pretty good copies too, cool chopping knives same as we used for our cookery course but a third of the price,jeans and other items of clothing. To round off a satisfying day we met up with a couple of friends from earlier in the week and celebrated a really good and cheap time in Chiang Mia with some strong local beer. Our only muck up was not getting around to sorting out a packaged trip to take us to the Loas border (Chris's fault - to chilled out to be bothered) so we've made it a bit of a mission for ourselves for the next couple of days - proper DIY travelling (unfortunately it costs more and involves greater effort).
Up at the crack of dawn for a good 45 min power walk to the out of town bus station only to find our bus was full (guess who's fault? to busy wanting to drink beer instead of pre booking the bus) so onto plan B, having to catch a bus to another small town and change after 4 hrs onto another local bus to take us the 3 hrs up to the Thai - Laos border where we caught our first Tuk Tuk in Thailand to speed up our slow pace to the border, crossing before it shut. Made it with half an hour to go...I love it when a plan comes together!
Our first impressions of Loas were slightly overshadowed by the greed in the border town of Hauy Xai everyone trying to rip off the travellers knowing there's nowhere else to go as from here its a 2 day slowboat down the Mekong river to the first big town, so we sat on our guest house balcony eating our street food and drinking beer Lao cursing these parasites!
The next day our little adventure began with about 80 travellers trying to board a very ricketty long boat with capacity for more like 50 people so after much humming and harring another baot was drafted in to carry the excess PAX, by the time we actually got going we'd been sat on this thing for 3 hours, only plus side was we had comfyish car seats to plonk our rears in whilst others had only bare wooden seats: Ouch for the Pile sufferers in our group!
The next 6 hours were barable only thanks to our vast array of travel entertainment and the views down river weren't so bad either, we got some interesting looks from the locals as we pulled out our magnetic scrabble set...Even the crew aren't able to sit on the boat forever so at about 6.30 pm we docked at a small village for the night to recharge our aching numb bums and grab some food.The small hamlet of Pak Beng came with a bit of a reputation of being a bit dodgy and rather expensive but we found good cheap accomadation and the local noodle soup from the market was top notch both cheaper than Hauy Xai, some people don't know how to shop about for a good deal.
The next morning we got going nice and early trying to secure the VIP seats again, unfortunately it was a different boat which was only kitted out with the bolt upright wooden arse torture benches, we did manage to grab a cushion each more for asthetics than for comfort!
Much of a muchness is about the best way to decribe the days journey- think ground hog day but with a very numb behind and a belly full of banana's (the only snack we found to be a reasonable price).
At last we reached our destination... the very picturesque and photographic town of Luang Prabang (try saying that fast a few times after a having a couple of bevvies).