Mae Salong to Chiang Saen

The market kindly only disturbs our regular 10 hour sleep after 7. It's full of pink eggs and pigs' heads, and Chinese herbs and boxes. And women in colourful hill-tribe dress. It also has good rotis and doughnuts, and we breakfast in the silver early morning light beneath glistening electricity cables humming over the valley.

It's only an hour and a half to Chiang Saen. The first hour continues the endless bends and sharp rises and falls across hills and steep brown valleys, opening into more sympathetic paddy filled green with silhouetted bridges, and wooden stilted houses. The last half hour is a four lane highway. I immediately declare my love for the winding road over hill and dale.

I'm exhausted when we arrive though, and pass out in our large white open-windowed room looking into mango trees and over the lazy romantic Mekong into Laos. We're starting to wonder if we'll manage the whole trip. Despite my new found love of the winding road, the remaining 3 days of squiggle on the map along the Laos border kindle fear.

It's a lovely town. Hazy and lazy by the drifting river. Hard to feel urgency here. We meander along the river. At every turn there is a ruin; on every ruin there is a sign explaining that this is now a deserted temple.