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Sabiedee

So that is how you say hello is Laos, once again I am faced with a really hard tonal language, not good for a tone deaf person. I am going to backtrack a bit and tell you about my last weekend in Thailand, because it was mildly amusing. So Heather had heard about this awesome sunrise hike that is not in the guidebook, and so naturally Rach and I decided to scope it out. We took a bus to Chiang Rai and from there tried to figure out how to get to this lookout point called Puh Chi Fah. From what we could gather the only way to get to this place for sunrise is to rent a car and leave Chiang Rai at 2 in the morning, a little intimidating since they drive on the left side of the road. Plan A was to rent a car from the travel agency which had a budget rental car sign outside. Plan A was foiled when they had no more cars for us to rent. Walking down the street we saw plan B: A man with a small closet like shop renting cars off the street...bingo. Ok I will admit, it was a bit dodgy. Signing our contract was rather hilarious. So it is written in Thai with an English translation, which gets progressively worse throughout the document. We asked to see the insurance papers (like it would do any good since they would be in Thai as well) but the guy could not find them in the huge stack of other insurance papers. He assured us that we would not have to pay more than 8000 Baht in case of an accident. We pointed out that it did not say that on our contract, so he handed us a pen and told us to write it in. ( I am assuming that contract was not worth the paper it was written on) It was that easy, we had ourselves a huge 7 seat SUV. Driving was not as bad as I expected, I only drove on the wrong side once. The hardest part was shifting with the left hand. Also the turning signal and wipers are reversed so everytime I went to make turn my wipers went on. The "hike" turned out to be a 700 meter walk, but since Thai people don't walk, it is probably considered a hike. This was definitely a not a touristy place, we saw one other westerner in the masses of people. It was a really cool experience, and lots of people wanted to take pictures with us. After the sunrise we drove around a bit and checked out some of the small villages. Rach made a young child not just cry, but wail when she tried to play peekaboo with him. Scary blue eyes....
We made it back to Chiang Rai safely without having to test out the old insurance plan.