Dalama Adventures Tale of two corporate types ditching their jobs and traveling the world for 14 months... check out all photos, blogs & interesting tid bits at http://www.dalama.net

Our bus from Pai to Chiang Kong took all day.  We had to backtrack to Chiang Mai, and then proceed north to the border town of Chiang Kong.  We stopped off at a cashew and sesame factory enroute, and stocked up on some yummy treats for the ride.  We were with a good crew in the mini-van; an Italian girl next to me traveling for over two years, kind of a gypsy selling handmade jewelry, comes from a wealthy family in Milan; a Dutch guy, Frank; two Brits who sold one of their homes and packed up their lives at home for a good two years on the road in their dream-of-a-lifetime trip; a couple from the UK who had been living and working in NZ for the past two years...  all had great travel experiences and stories to share, and made the ride pass quickly.  We finally arrived after 6:00 p.m. to Chiang Kong and the border and immigration offices were closed.  We opted to stay at the same guesthouse as the other package tourists in our mini-van.  The place, NamHong Guesthouse tops our list for dumpiest locations we've stayed in to date... 4 walls, a bed with dark sheets, nasty dirty fan and a ton of cockroaches that came out after dark, and a dirty shared bathroom to boot!  We stayed out as late as we possibly could that night, so as to spend as little awake time as possible in the room.  We organized our Laos visa that evening, and spent the night enjoying the monsoon rains with our motley min-van crew.  Little did we know that these people would be the only tourists we'd encounter for the next couple of weeks, and how fortunate we were that a few that we met also wanted to trek to similar remote provinces that we had planned to go to.