Luang Namtha

After our day of rest, sweet and sour chicken and sticky rice with soy sauce/chillis, we started our trek. The day began with a shopping spree to obtain food for the trek, pots for cooking, and mosquito nets. We met up with two funny French guys, Alan from Canada, an Irish girl and a Bermudan girl. We minivan'd our way to a bunch of local villages and peeped the local culture. Kids played between bamboo houses and a few of them had pet birds. The locals were just as interested looking at us as we were at them. They also had a grove of rubber trees and were harvesting rubber to ship to China.
After the village tours we started our trek into the jungle. We walked up and down for an hour then stopped for lunch. Vegetables, sticky rice, bamboo shoots and sweet chili and tofu sauce. We continued on after lunch across hills overlooking rice fields, through tall grasses and bamboo forests. After a couple hours we began descending a steep slope to a river. Luckily it wasn't raining so the mud wasn't too slippery. We crossed the river and climbed a couple minutes up to our jungle camp. We spent the rest of the day hanging out on benches and combating mosquitos. We played drinking games with Lao Lao and I began to start losing. This was bad news because the games got progressively harder with more and more Lao Lao, so it was a vicious cycle. The guides kept on saying "Alek more lao lao!!"
The following day was a long 7 hour trek in the rain. The guides were very helpful and gave us hands wherever it was slippery. Every time one of them offered me their hand they would say "lao lao, Alek!". The jungle was amazingly dense and lush. We all got completely soaked and the mud turned into a slip n slide. The guides had fashioned us all walking sticks the day before, and they were completely necessary to stabilize oneself and stop from slipping down the hill. The trek involved climbing up steep slopes and slipping down for the whole 7 hours. I am not sure which was more difficult, up or down. All in all, it was an awesome experience. I wish I could have taken photos of the giant banana trees with huge fronds and the bamboo forests, but it was too wet to risk pulling out my camera. We made it back, soaked, to the road and tuk tuk'd back to civilization.
The following day, the Frenchies, Alan and I headed into Thailand while Elizabeth went down to Vientiane. We made it to Chiang Rai, spent the night there, then another night in Chiang Mai, then Alan and I headed up to Pai. We basically just made a run for Pai, which is apparently a really cool town and was where Dave had been kickboxing for the last 4 weeks.