Sleepy Chiang Khong

18 November 2018

Not much to do today, catch up on admin and take the 11:30 bus to Chiang Khong on the Laos border. The bus was a totally knackered old specimen, with open windows and door to keep cool, and it rattled us along the 2 hour journey for a princely £1.50 each. Because it was half empty, it was actually perfectly comfortable.

Chiang Khong is sleepy. Half the facilities here exist only to serve the steady stream of tourists that want to take the 2 day boat ride down the Mekong to Luang Prabang. We didn’t do much more than go hunting for interesting things to eat, guided by a random blog we’d found suggesting some local goodies.

For lunch we had khao soi in a back-street, in a place we’d never have guessed might be here if it weren’t for that blog (we didn’t find the place mentioned in the blog, but in failing to find it we found this one!). The khao soi was very different from the ones we enjoyed in Chiang Mai eight years ago – just regional variations on the theme of “spicy noodle soup”.

For dinner we did find the place noted in the blog, and just like in Chiang Saen we managed to fluke our way into enjoying a local speciality. Faced with a menu of extremely unhelpful English descriptions (fried fish salad, soft fried fish, roast fish salad, local fried fish, etc) I randomly chose “Fried soft fish with garlic” and got a plate of small deep-fried fish with loads of crispy garlic. They were brilliant, so we had a second plate of them. Very good with beer.

Otherwise Chiang Khong was asleep. There was nowhere to buy snacks for our Mekong cruise tomorrow except for a single 7-11 food shop. We headed back to Dan Riverside hotel for an early night.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, November 24th, 2018 at 3:47 pm and is filed under Thailand. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.