I turned 30 years old in the mischievous city of Amsterdam, and that was 5 years before a guy named Wichai and his beautiful hill tribe handbags created the vision for Ethnic Lanna and therefore changed my life.. now as I think of the posible destinations for celebrating my 40th year of life (India, Bali, Northern Vietnam) I decided to come and explore literally my back yard, the off the beaten path hill tribes of Northern Laos. So my girlfriend Ning and I strapped on the backpacks and headed East on a bus from Chiang Mai to the border of Thailand-Laos, headed to the city of Chiang Khong. Our bus had the heading of "Chiang Khong" posted on the outside with a large sign, so everything was good right? well, nothing is set in stone in Thailand, even when traveling with a Thai.. five hours later at 11pm the bus stopped at a town called Phee where they announced this was the end of the bus ride. Confusion clottering our thoughts, we kindly asked why we were not going to Chiang Khom and the driver replied "because this bus doesn't go there anymore".. simple as that. We found out we were still 1 hour away from the border and our option was to find a hotel and take the 6am bus to Chiang Khom so we could cross the Lao border in time to continue our journey. Luckily the tiny bus station in this tiny town had free wifi so I logged in and was able to locate some nearby hotel on Google Maps.. as we started to walk that way, some kid was yelling something as he ran towards us from about a block away. When we understood him he was saying "hurry, a bus is waiting for you to take you to Chiang Khom".. and sure enough, the word had spread that we were stranded and somebody stopped a passing bus that welcomed us aboard and took us to Chiang Khong for a whopping $2.50 each.. so our trip continues as scheduled.. gotta love Thailand ;)