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On the rest day in Laos I gave Penny the love and attention that I had promised her before the rest of the group arrived to join us following their car collection in Bangkok on Monday. In the afternoon I went for a walk around town and discovered that boys will be boys the world over. There where 4 boys on the rail of the bridge jumping the 8 metres into the flooded creek along with trying to push a very unwilling friend off the bridge. The creek was raging with dirty flood water and the boys would jump in to the spaces between the flood debris. Not even my cup of tea when I was young and pretty silly about 40 years ago. The first dinner together was at the Laung Namtha Night Market where you can get all sort of great food and some dishes most of us didn’t really take to; like the eggs that were nearly ready to hatch and then cooked as a meal or the kebab sticks of chicken feet. Most of us ate the roast duck and pork with fried rice or noodles. As we parted for the night we agreed to meet in the morning for a 7.30 departure to arrive at the Chinese border when it opened at 8.30 to get through early and have all our car and licence paperwork completed on Friday before the police knocked off for the weekend. At 4.00am I woke with the realisation the China border was one hour ahead of us. That was the end of my sleep. I was to scared to go to sleep in case I over-slept. At 5.30am I texted Ross that we had to leave by 6.30 and he got everyone organised so we all ended up at the border to meet our guide in time. Mr Alim was waiting for us and will be taking care of us till we depart Western China on about the 13th of September. The border crossing followed by the drive up to Mengula to get our Chinese number plates, driving licences and safety instruction, all went off like clockwork and we were back on the road at 12.30 on route to Jinghong for the night stop where some of us purchased SIM cards for our IPads. The drive from the Border up to Jinghong was through fantastic mountains covered with rubber plantations with the trees just starting to produce rubber. The night finished with a welcome banquet put on by Alim and Silk Road Adventures. It a bit of a struggle working on the blog in China so this will all be sent home to Julie who will construct the page and publish it for me. Thank you very much Honey for all the help you have given me with construction, maintenance and ongoing guidance with grammar and spelling.
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