On the Chinese Border at Muang Sing

The old, raspy rooster woke me at the crack of dawn before wheezing off to, I’m certain, chain-smoke another pack of cheap Chinese cigarettes.

In the small northern town of Muang Sing, I rented a mountain bike and rode through the early morning fog up to the Chinese border. Nothing to see, really, and I was not allowed to cross, but amusing all the same.

Muang Sing used to house the largest opium market in all of Asia before successful crop substitutions and crackdowns largely put an end to it in the last ten years or so. But the addiction rate in this province is supposedly still one of the highest in the world.

A few images from Muang Sing and around: