Chiang Khong & Huay Xai - For Crying Out Lao-d

Border crossings. You never know how they're going to go. One day one official might decide to charge you a little but extra might decide that they actually don't want to let you into the country unless you pay a separate fee. You can queue for hours or for minutes, and so it was with great trepidation that we approached our first one.
The bus to Chiang Khong, right on the border with Laos, was the first rickety old bus we'd been on. It was noisy and hot and precariously piled with stuff, for South East Asia buses not only transport people they also seem to function as some sort of unofficial FedEx. The journey through town was a hot walk up a fairly nondescript street that took much longer than we had anticipated and my first boat trip on the Mekong lasted for approximately three minutes.
The man issuing our visas was certainly in no hurry but we didn't have any problems. We waited and sweated and he chatted with his colleague as he tauntingly dangled his rubber stamp over our passports.
We took a brief glance around Huay Xai (very easy as like Chiang Khong it is essentially one road) and crashed out in the most revoltingly frilled and fancy guesthouse room I have ever seen.
As we cooled down we foolishly thought the worst was over, but very soon we would come to realise that for us, Huay Xai was cursed.
You'd never guess at first glance that this simple little place of guesthouses and restaurants would be so intrinsically evil, but so it was. The trouble started for us that very afternoon when we tried to use the internet. Every interaction with local people we had was difficult. The Laos response to our questions, which they didn't understand, seemed to be to stare blankly over our heads and walk away. So as you can image it took us a while to find somewhere we could use a computer and when we did no one could tell us how to stop the page randomly translating back into Lao every five minutes. This ultimately resulted in Theo's card getting blocked.
The next day I woke up to find two things amiss, one was my boyfriend rolling around on the bed clutching his stomach and groaning, the other was my sponge bag, which was full of ants.
Very soon I was too ill to get on the minivan we had booked to take us away from the accursed town and we rolled across the street and checked into our most expensive air-conned room yet.
Of course we knew it would happen eventually, we'd been having far too much good luck really, but that didn't make me have any warmer feelings for Huay Xai. The next day we both felt fine so we packed up and got the hell out of there.