Ok, over to me (before that was Sara). Of course now I only have 8 minutes left, so I have to be quick too. I tried to put pictures on about 4 times, but to no avail. Oh well,. You'll just have to be satisfied with our stories. So the river boat was really really cool, but at the same time, we were glad when it was over. It was a LONG 3 days. First we took an overnight bus trip (left at 8 PM got to the boarder of Chiang Khong at 3 AM). The bus was NOT comfortable. Totally nuts. Somehow Sara and I were put back with the luggage and we managed to wedge various parts of our limbs into the luggage to keep ourselfs from flying all over the back seat as the driver tore his way around windy corners. It was, shall we say, an experience. I got a little carsick, but it wasn't nearly as bad as for some of the people on the bus who had to keep having the driver pull over so they could throw up. I felt really bad for them. Then we got to the boarder at 3 AM and were shown to rooms were we slept until 7 AM. We were then back up and headed in the back of a truck to the river where we had to do all the visa and passport stuff before taking a little long skiff across the river to the Laos side. There we waited for MORE of the beuracratic stuff before we finally got taken to the long boat. It was kind of funny, and yet not, because there was a Thai man there who gathered all the tourists together and gave a 20 minute shpeal about how awful the slow boat was and how it was dangerous and that people would steal our stuff and the town we'd stop in overnight was awful and expensiv and he got a lot of people to change their minds and take a bus to Lua Prabang. We may have switched except we'd heard such great things about the slow boat from friends. In the end, it turned out the guy worked for the bus company and it was a total scam! Crazy huh? Anyways, the slow boat WAS awesome. There were so many amazing things to see from the water and I just stared out the whole day and listened to a books on tape. Very relaxing. That first night, we stayed in a little village that was up on a hill that shot out of the water. The town was so cool and the people so nice and not at all like the guy had warned us about. The following day, we had another boat ride that lasted about 7 hours until we got to Lua Prabang. So far we love it here and I will write more later, cause I'm out of time online. Love, Sarah