To Chiang Khong via Chiang Saen

By Bea
10/03/2019
We left Chiang Rai on the early morning local ‘baht bus’ for the 1.5 hour journey to the river port city Chiang Saen. It seemed to make sense to visit Chiang Saen and the golden triangle on our way to Chiang Khong, (as opposed a day trip to the golden triangle from Chiang Rai) and we had read about getting a long tail from Chiang Saen to Chiang Khong, which sounded fun. Well lets say that was our thinking at the time. The bus trip was cool...well cold - yes cold! 17 degrees, while we were loving the cooler weather in the mornings and evenings, sitting in the back seat with the rear door wired open showed how soft we had become! It was definitely a local bus route passing through several villages to drop off school kids and ladies selling lottery tickets. The scenery along the way was picturesque and rural... I have to admit, I will be glad when the election is over as the “visual pollution” with all the election campaign posters is really intruding the landscape and spoiling my views of the green rice paddies and banana plantations!

We arrived in Chiang Saen, what a bustling and vibrant border town it was, Pete instantly fell in love. We planned to dump our backpacks in a locker / left luggage place and look around for a few hours, then head to Chiang Khong. We realised almost instantaneously that this was definitely not a tourist town, no tourist information, no bus timetables...no lockers! Pete had the idea to call into the police station to ask if they knew of anywhere to dump the luggage. The policemen were super nice and said if it was only for the day, we could leave it there with them! (Providing we took any valuables). We thought, that was a pretty safe option!! For their kindness, we ended up buying them a bag of chocolate biscuits and a couple of kilos of oranges to which they were surprised and grateful for.

When we think of international trade we immediately think of massive ports (Hong Kong) multi national companies and huge container ships. Not 37 pineapples and 3 cartons of biscuits being transported on shoulders between tuk tuk and long tail and vice versa. This is what makes border towns like Chiang Saen so fascinating its international trade at human scale and pace, No big dock area just steps down to the river (via customs) full of people with boxes of plastic wares, bags of cabbages, bamboo cages of chickens, the small stuff of every day life
What also supervised us was that the town has several ruins of Lanna period wats that hark back to its historical importance. It is believed that this area was first civilised in 545 CE and became one of first strong holds (then known as Yonok) of the Tai people’s they began there migration from Yunnan. The current city of Chiang Saen was founded around 1325 by Saen Phu, ruler of the Lanna Kingdom, so we wandered the streets discovering the ruins and immersing in the vibrancy of the town.

We took a quick tuk tuk ride up to the ‘golden triangle’ - had to say we had done that! As well as a visit to the Opium Museum before collecting our bags and heading for the long tail.. oh they don’t run any more, bugger, oh well we will just get the bus.. oh the bus doesn’t run on Sunday.. so we found ourselves in the back of the local song taew for the 1hour journey to Chiang Khong.

As it turned out this was a very easy option. The song taew we boarded was already pretty full of locals with all their market wares of whom they excitedly chatted asking each other how much they paid for their cabbages, or cooked chicken, they seemed very interested in one old lady’s brightly colour yarn. None of these people knew each other, but they were genuinely interested in what bargain each person got. We made our way through many villages, dropping off each person we realised this was an all stops, along the back roads so the 1hr journey became 1.5 but a hell of a lot more scenic as for at least half the time we followed the Mekong. Despite the wonderful scenery I was glad to get out and stretch as being six foot, the song taew roof was about 2 inches too low

In Chiang Khong we stayed at the Hub Pub & Funky Box hostel a cheap and cheerful hostel run by Eve and God. The hostel guests are generally backpackers on their way to the Laos border and on to Luang Prabang via the 2 day slow boat. On our arrival we discovered that the boat we wanted to take wasn’t leaving until Wednesday (it was Sunday!). We could however take the rickety cheap boat on Monday along with 100 young back packers! It took us about a nano-second to pull the “we have the option of saying no card” and the upgrade!”. This forced us slow down for a while and spend 2 days discovering Chiang Khong.

Each day consisted of a morning walk along the river, accompanied by our hostel resident “guide dog” Zelda, whom also patiently waited whilst we had our street side bowl of noodles. On one of the days, one of the owners dropped us into the national park with a kayak and fishing rod. A couple of hours were spent in the serenely quiet park on the lake just paddling and fishing. Locals were dotted around the lake either fishing themselves or attending their small farms, one building their bamboo house another herding buffalo his from his canoe.

The other day a few of us from the hostel were taken on a guided 10km hike to a waterfall. Hike it certainly was! The path took us through some of the local hill tribe area, then into the jungle which included a bit of rock climbing (clambering) and wading through various streams. Amazingly I held my footing! We stopped at 2 different waterfalls and on the second one, our host had prepared a picnic lunch for us. A well needed stop. The water was refreshingly cool.... a little too cool for a swim for us.

The nights in this hostel have had a lot of atmosphere and does seem a bit strange spending our last few nights in Thailand eating Belgium beef stew or homemade hamburger! But then again we have already spent 15 years eating Thai!