After we got over the fact that we couldn't do our China visa in Chiang Mai, we accepted that we'd do it in Laos. We didn't really do much over the next few days, it's just been too hot to do much. Although we did have a wander around some of the temples in Chiang Mai. There are some pretty ones, but with the town having so many, I don't have a clue which ones we visited! John is getting all templed out! I don't mind seeing the cultural side of Thailand. I do feel that we haven't really done much in Chiang Mai, and we've been here over a week now.

Slow boat booked on the Mekong

We did do something of use on our last day here ; we had to figure out how we're going to get to Laos. I always heard about the border crossing into Laos on the Mekong Delta and the slow boat over 2 days. So we found out that we can take a bus to Chang Kong from here, which will take us to Huay Xai, the town where we can take the slow boats from. So we booked that up to take us in the morning. Oh and we also done our laundry and downloaded our tiger kingdom pictures, so it was quite a successful day.

Earthquake

So we came back late afternoon to just chill out in our room. I was just backing up the photos on the laptop and external hard drive, John was watching a film, when I felt like a heard of elephants were tramping on the floor above us. John said he felt the bed shaking! It was at that point we realised it was an earthquake. So we immediately ran outside into the street. Other people were also running outside from our hotel too. We're in a building with at least 5 floors, it's quite a large building, so we didn't want to be inside if anything started to collapse. It was really scary and we felt the tremors while in the room for about 30 seconds.

I couldn't believe we were in an earthquake. Luckily nobody was hurt, and there wasn't any structural damage. It took me back to when we had an earthquake where I live, near Folkestone, Kent. I was driving to work in my car and never felt a thing! But when I got work, everyone said the whole building was shaking, which this time I felt here in Thailand. We had to stay outside the hotel for a while in case there were any aftershocks, but when we thought it was safe, we went back inside. I googled it, and it measured 6.0 on the Richter scale, so it was a powerful quake. We were just lucky that nobody was hurt or injured around here. Apparently the quake struck near Chiang Rai, which is the direction we're heading in tomorrow...! It was also felt right down in Bangkok too.