Day 42-46

We took off for Chiang Mai from Vangviang at 10am. The first bus drove us to Vientiane which took about 3 hours. Becca sat with a heater between her feet which looked super comfortable, not to mention it kept her toasty warm the whole trip. More heat is always a good thing in Thailand right? We got onto a new bus in Vientiane around 4pm, and we had to pay 2500 kip to leave Lao (about 25 cents). We drove over the friendship bridge back to Thailand.......HOME (well familiar ground I guess). We changed buses again in Udonthani, which left around 8pm. For the final and longest stretch we rode a bus that had reclining seats, blankets and a snack pack for take off (we were riding VIP style). The snack pack had an apple, water cup, jelly cookies, and an orange juice (which I later found out was an orange flavoured yogurt drink.....pretty sick). I sat beside a girl from Victoria. We had the same travel backpack and I almost swiped hers instead of mine. I could have had a whole new bag of tricks. The roads were unbelievably windy. I fell asleep, and dreamt about being tossed around like a ping pong ball, oh wait we pretty much were being tossed from side to side in the bus. We would randomly stop along side the road while the driver would pick up packages that were being sent to Chiang Mai. We had a scheduled rest stop at 1am, and we got a free meal or a free pop. The meal looked like pork vomit on platter under a heat lamp..........mmm tempting. We decided against explosive diareaha and drank a Fanta instead (pop). We were scheduled to arrive in Chiang Mai at 8am, so we hopped on board to drive for 7 more hours. We arrived in Chiang Mai safely but super exhausted. We found a room at Johadda guesthouse. Its owned by an Assuie-Thai couple and they had a kangaroo statue on the top balcony. We slept until the late afternoon trying to forget about the bus trip nightmare!

Recovering from the bus trauma trip, we hit up a pub near our guesthouse. Customers wrote on the walls of the pub with sharpie markers. A certain Collen wrote "Oilers cup run 2006". Looks like their cup run might be a faint dream since they are stinking up the NHL!
We shopped around the night Bazaar (market). The market is set up every night rain or shine, holiday or no. It was neat-o!

We switched guesthouses for the next couple of days, and moved into the GM Blue Guesthouse. They had a nice court Yard, no drain pipes directly above my bed, and they actually let us put TP down the toilet. We checked out a Buddha temple, then tracked down the nearest cinema to watch a movie. The Tuk Tuk driver dropped us off at the mall so we could hit up a movie. We couldn't find an open door. We hiked around the mall searching for a way in. We got to the opposite side of the mall and saw a concert in the distance in the middle of the parking lot. We decided against crashing the Thai concert and continued our search. We found a parking lot, where we were informed that the cinema was on the 4th floor, but no one had a useful clue to where an entrance was. We finally found an open door in a shady part of the park-ade and headed up to watch Babal. After the movie was over the cinema was dead. There were no Tuk Tuk drivers in sight to take us home. We started walking in the direction which we assumed was toward home. After walking for a good 20 minutes we finally hitched a ride home safely.

We spent one afternoon chillian and relaxin' in a pool near our guesthouse. We met a couple from Calgary who had just come from traveling New Zealand. They gave Kathryn some useful hints and wished her luck on her trip. Later we hit up the market for the last time to finish our shopping. We bartered for everything , even the beer.

We headed out early in the morning to hit up Bangkok with Kathryn for our last night toghether in Thailand as the "Triple Trouble Yaul!"