Return to Bangkok

Vientiane's Champs-Elysées (Lane Xang Avenue) [Enlarge]

Getting from Vientiane to Nong Khai in Thailand is a multi-stage process: Transport 24 kilometres from Vientiane to the Friendship Bridge; walk through the Laos border; minibus across the Friendship Bridge (pedestrians not allowed); walk through the Thai border; tuk-tuk three kilometres to Nong Khai. Luckily there is also a bus service which runs all the way from Vientiane to Nong Khai, so we decided to take that rather than piecing together separate transport for each stage. We had borrowed someone else's Laos guidebook and found that there were three buses a day, and the next one was due at 10:30 from Vientiane's Market Place bus station. We checked out of our hotel and walked the few blocks to the bus station. It was stiflingly hot and muggy, even at 09:45. Low cloud meant the humidity was even higher than usual. A leisurely walk with our small bags left us soaked in sweat. It got better: when we reached the bus station we found that the timetable had changed, and there was no longer a 10:30 bus! The next one was at 12:40. A local taxi tout helped us to clarify our options. We could get a local bus to the border—he pointed out the local bus crammed full of people, shopping and livestock—or we could get a tuk-tuk. His tuk-tuk. Neither of these options was appealing, especially since they would only get us as far as the Laos border at the start of the Friendship Bridge. We chose to go with our own, third way: wait for the 12:40 air conditioned bus. We found a nice cool café round the corner to have breakfast.

After a couple of croissants and a leisurely read of the previous day's Bangkok Times we wandered back at the bus station. The clouds had lifted and the air was less humid, but it was still blisteringly hot. Nevertheless the bus was on time and we were at the border post in no time at all. Every border crossing we've done has been different and not one of them has gone according to plan. We'd read up on what we needed for the Laos/Thai border and arrived at Laos immigration with our pre-completed departure cards, passports and a crisp 20,000 kip note to cover our exit tax (GBP 1.07 / USD 2.07). The guards took the departure cards, stamped the passports, then decided to waive the exit fee! There was a booth marked "exit tax" or something similar, but the person inside just waved us through. We have no idea why.

Back on the waiting bus we crossed the Friendship Bridge back into Thailand. Ever wondered what happens when you cross a land border from a country where they drive on the right to one where they drive on the left? The road turned into a dual carriageway, then each carriageway curved round like a bow tie before turning back in on itself. The two halves met in the middle at what was basically a cross-roads. You make sure nothing is coming from the other direction, cross over and the road goes back to being a single carriageway with you on the other side. Simple.

And then we were back in Thailand. It didn't take long for us to know that we'd made the right decision to stay the previous night in Vientiane. Nong Khai doesn't have a lot to offer. We took a tuk-tuk to the railway station to buy our tickets for the night train back to Bangkok, then another tuk-tuk back into town to find somewhere to eat an early dinner. There are restaurants in Nong Khai, but we somehow managed to miss them. Eventually, right at the end of the street on the river front we came across Tony's, an English pub, guest house and restaurant. There was a blackboard outside boasting at the size of the pies, the greasiness of the all-day breakfasts, the milkiness of the hot tea, etc. In England we would have walked straight past the place. But we were out of options and we had a twelve hour train journey ahead of us. Glenn went for the house special, the steak and ale pie with mash, peas and gravy. Isla, ever adventurous tried the sausage and mash. How wrong first impressions can be! The home-made steak and ale pie was the best that Glenn had ever tasted, and Isla was delighted to find that her mash was lumpy, just like her dad makes it. Just goes to show that you never can tell unless you try!

We got a third and final tuk-tuk back to the train station and boarded our train. We had treated ourselves to a two-berth first class compartment back to Bangkok. It had a washbasin and was clean in all the places that mattered, like the bedding. We left Nong Khai on time and shut the curtains on the night. Two hours into the journey we asked the steward to make up our beds and we went to bed. We discovered that it is much easier to sleep on a night train than a night bus. The rocking was very soothing and with our ear plugs in even the train's horn was drowned out. We woke up at 05:30 on the outskirts of Bangkok with the GPS reading 21 kilometres to go, and we arrived into the station exactly on time.

We were even earlier arriving at the Prince Palace Hotel than we had been last time we got to Bangkok, and again they had no double rooms available yet. We must have looked a bit crumpled and travel weary because after a few minutes of sitting in the lobby to wait for someone to check out, the receptionist called us over and said he would upgrade us to a suite and we could have the key now. Result! After exploring our suite (OK, it's not all that big—it's just that we're used to budget accommodation, so humour us) we took a quick shower changed our clothes. We were ready to hit the town and face our next challenge… the China visa.

Day 094
Vientiane to Bangkok

This map shows the route we took in this post. Click it to see larger maps of our whole route at flickr.

Maps are taken from the CIA World Factbook.

Voyages on the King of Bus

King of Bus [Enlarge]

No matter whether you've booked a first class compartment on a train or a seat on a luxury bus, travelling by public transport in second and third-world countries is still guaranteed to be an experience. It never seems to be the case of "got on, got off at the other end". But experiences are what it's all about on this kind of trip. At least that's what we keep telling each other.

We caught a tuk-tuk to the bus station and arrived in lots and lots of time for our 08:00 departure. The bus arrived and from the outside it looked fine—clean and modern with the correct number of wheels, an intact windscreen and no visible damage. The paint job and decoration inside and out made it look not unlike a drag queen's boudoir. But from the safety signs inside we deduced that it had originated in South Korea and was supposed to look like this. It was the type of coach where the passengers all sit upstairs above the driver, and proudly advertised the fact that it was no ordinary bus, not even a VIP bus. It was Super VIP; it was quite literally, the 'King of Bus'. At some point all the seats down the right side of the bus had been shifted about a bit and bolted down in different positions. The result was that our seats had a huge amount of extra leg room. Great news for Glenn, less so for the poor buggers sitting behind him who only had half the room they should have had. On most seats, ours included, the recline mechanism was broken. Luckily on most seats it had malfunctioned in the upright position, but the man in the seat at the front had to spend his whole journey almost horizontal. If we collided with anything he would shoot feet-first through the windscreen.

As the bus began its rocky progress out of the bus station we realised that not all the seats were entirely bolted to the floor. And the advertised 'air conditioning' was in fact, a fan.

The road connecting Luang Prabang and Vientiane is one of Laos's principal highways. This means that most of the time there is room for two vehicles to pass one another, so long as they're both careful. The first half of the journey is spent winding through the mountains and there are some sheer drops waiting to claim the reckless overtaker. Where safety barriers exist they are made of woven bamboo and coco leaves—they were not really going to stop the King of Bus. The GPS had told us, as we sat in the bus station, that it was 214 kilometres to Vientiane. Unfortunately it didn't know about the switch-back bends that saw us spend as much time travelling away from our destination and we did towards it, or about the fact that we'd be ascending and descending as much as one vertical kilometre every half hour or so. After an hour we were less than ten kilometres in a straight line from where we had started.

When we finally stopped for lunch (included in the ticket price), we were both feeling pretty travel sick and could only manage to drink a Pepsi and stretch our wobbly legs. We were glad to find that the lunch stop marked the transition from hills to flat plain, and so from that point on we were generally pointing in the right direction most of the time. It was a great relief. Progress still wasn't rapid because of the patented Laos traffic-calming craters that we had to keep stopping for, but at least the road was fairly straight. We were feeling better, making good progress, when suddenly there was a great grinding, crashing noise from overhead. Since leaving Luang Prabang the inadequate fan system had been fighting a losing battle with the heat in the coach, and now it had very publicly given up. At first we thought the King of Bus was disintegrating, but the driver turned off the air and the grinding stopped. The steward yanked the cover off and started poking at the fans with a screwdriver while the driver periodically turned them on to see if the poking had by a miracle fixed it. Of course it hadn't. The stuffy bus got even stuffier.

The beautiful scenery and fascinating villages we passed along the road were a reminder of why we prefer overland travel to flying, despite the discomfort. In every village at least one house had a huge satellite dish. They were all identical, which suggests that maybe they are government issue, one per village. About half of the houses looked like they were connected to the overhead power wires, but most didn't have running water. Each village had a stand pipe or a village pump with a queue of people beside it and on one corner a placard announced that World Vision Singapore had funded clean water for that area. And we were only looking at the developed parts along the main highways and waterways—the equivalent of the M4 corridor in the UK.

We weren't quite sure when we would arrive into Vientiane. The lady in the seat in front of us had been told the journey was seven hours, our agent had said eight and we'd seen a sign outside another agency that advertised it as nine. We hadn't booked any accommodation because we weren't sure whether we wanted to stay the night in Vientiane or to cross the Laos/Thai border to Nong Khai that evening. It really depended on how we felt when we got there—whether Vientiane looked like it was worth looking around. It was almost 17:00 when we got to Vientiane's Khoua Louang bus station—exactly nine hours after we set out. We were very hot and sticky. Thunder was rumbling around the city and we decided we'd prefer to find accommodation while it was still dry and daylight. And we didn't want to quit Laos without even seeing its capital. The first place we tried was a large hotel that had undoubtedly been very smart about ten years ago, but was looking tired now. It was USD 35 a night which for a capital city is not too bad, but we felt we could do better. Around the corner was the Riverside Hotel, complete with a sign saying "new open, special rates". We took a look inside. The room were were shown still had the cellophane on the lamp shades. It was great value at USD 16 per night. We took it and, leaving the bags in the room we went downstairs to check in.

After a very much needed shower and a change of clothes we went out for some dinner. The thunder storm had moved away but the humid air was no fresher. We found a busy, inviting looking restaurant where a mix of asian and western diners were sitting outside. We wanted to give Laos food one final try. We ordered several dishes including pork lab, a traditional Laos dish of minced meat with spices and lots of herbs. Isla liked it, but Glenn was itching to get back to his beloved Thai cuisine.

This is the first time we have turned up in a new town without booked accommodation. It was surprisingly easy! Maybe we will do it again some time. The experience with the fleas taught us that booking a place before you arrive doesn't really guarantee much.

Day 093
Luang Prabang to Vientiane

This map shows the route we took in this post. Click it to see larger maps of our whole route at flickr.

Maps are taken from the CIA World Factbook.

Viva Laos Vegas

Luang Prabang night market [Enlarge]

Our first night in Laos was also our first night sleeping under a mosquito net. We didn't really need it as we had air conditioning, but it was suspended from a hook in the ceiling and if we hadn't unfurled it we would have probably had strange dreams about ghosts hovering above the bed. Having tucked it in around the bed, we took everything we needed into our cocoon. Except we forgot the ear plugs, which we suddenly needed at 05:00 when the roosters started doing their noisy rooster thing. Yes, there was in fact a chicken coop right outside our ground-floor window.

Laos is an ex-French colony and one of the better things the French did to the place was to introduce the wonder of bread. Our breakfast consisted of freshly baked baguettes—not something we thought we would have in Asia! We would have liked to stay in the Merry Swiss for our second night but they were full, so we spent the first hour of the day finding another guest house—we eventually settled on the Xieng Mouane, which was in a colonial-style mansion set around a garden courtyard. Then the day was ours to spend hanging out in Luang Prabang, soaking up the weird ex-colonial astmosphere. Most of the official street signs were in Lao and French, but clearly the commercial pressure favours Lao and English, because the shops and menus were generally in those languages. Much to the chagrin of the many French tourists who still arrive in Laos expecting to be able to converse fluently with the locals. And also, much to our slightly twisted Anglo-Saxon amusement.

We did have one or two chores to accomplish, not least deciding on our onward route. We eventually settled on taking a bus south to the capital, Vientiane, from where we would cross back into Thailand and take the train back to Bangkok. We found an agent offering decent AC buses and booked two tickets on his Super VIP bus. It was hardly any more money than the regular AC one and we wanted to ensure the most comfortable journey possible—we had heard about Laos's roads. Apparently, when working out travelling times between cities you should use an average speed of twenty kilometres per hour. We also booked a couple of seats on the overnight train back to Bangkok.

When we reached for our wallet to pay for the tickets we realised that we weren't very well off for cash. Two nights at three times the price we had planned for had severely dented our reserves and we soon learned that the situation wasn't easy to resolve. For the first time on our whole journey we were in a country that doesn't have ATMs. They are just starting to be introduced in Vientiane, and they will probably spread very quickly. But for now, according to the travel agent, there are precisely none in Luang Prabang. We did have just enough cash for the bus tickets so we got the agent to cancel the train tickets—we will be able to book them from Vientiane or the Thai border town of Nong Khai.

We eventually found that there is a sort-of ATM in Luang Prabang—it is a dodgy-looking contraption in the Banque Pour le Commerce Exterieur Lao, a currency exchange office, which will only work with MasterCard credit cards (we generally use our Visa debit card in ATMs as the bank we switched to just before we started our trip doesn't charge us any commission or fees for making the transactions). Since we were going to have to make an advance against our credit cards anyway, we decided to pass on the machine and go up to the window.

In Laos, money is a bit of an issue generally. The local currency is the kip, but because of recent hyperinflation it has lost around eighty percent of its value. Unsurprisingly the locals prefer not to use it with tourists. Despite a law prohibiting companies from advertising prices for goods and services in anything other than kip, you are positively encouraged to pay for everything in either US dollars or Thai baht (always getting your change in kip, of course!). In our heads we still obviously work in pounds Sterling, so we are having to juggle four different currencies in our heads all the time! For example, we see a bus ticket advertised at 100,000 kip. In our heads we would be thinking about five quid, and we would actually hand over around ten dollars or 400 baht.

Anyway, we needed to get a fair bit of cash out in case the bus broke down half way to Vientiane and we were stuck needing accommodation. But it is difficult to change kip back into anything worthwhile when you leave Laos, so we wanted to get baht or dollars. The exchange staff were unwilling to issue dollars but we managed to persuade them to give us some baht, although the transaction would still be put on our card in dollars. We were going to get stung for commission on both ends (sounds painful)—the exchange office would take their 3% cut, as well as their favourable kip–dollar–baht exchange rate, then our credit card company would charge us interest and commission, and their own favourable dollar–Sterling exchange rate. We took the hit and bought 8,000 baht (GBP 126.93 / USD 244.61).

There were a couple of places we fancied visiting in Luang Prabang. There was the museum and the climb up to the temple on the hill in the centre of the city. We headed for the museum first but when we got there we discovered that we had to leave our shoes, bag and camera at the entrance and pay a foreigner-weighted entrance fee. We decided we couldn't be bothered, so instead we headed for the steps up to the temple. There are 328 steps according to the signs at the top and bottom. We were about 110 steps up when we bumped into the film crew from the BBC Holiday Programme. For non-British readers this is a long-running UK television show which, as the name suggests, reviews holiday destinations. It was not Judith Chalmers slogging up the hill, nor even Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen… what would the humidity have done to his frilly cuffs? Instead we had a chat between takes with the very friendly and modest Simon Calder. He was much more interested in hearing about our travels than talking about his own and we now have his business card and an invitation to send him any good travel tips we might come up with. We were tempted to drop the Laos Vegas quip into the conversation and claim it as our own, but by this time his director was ready to start filming again. The show is due to be aired in the UK some time in March. He had taken a slowboat down the Mehkong from Huayxai just like us (although he made the overnight stop in Pak Beng), and when you see him doing his piece in Luang Prabang at the temple at the top of the hill, think of us standing just out of the shot.

We wandered down the hill pausing briefly to see a giant footprint-shaped indentation in a rock—allegedly left by the Lord Buddha himself—and to listen to some monks enthusiastically bashing a very large drum. The night market was setting up as we walked back through the town. If we had been following the backpacker rules we would have had huge rucksacks as tall as us, which would have had plenty of room for hand carved Buddha and elephant statues, inlaid chess boards, beautiful handmade pressed-flower paper lampshades and notepads, and of course fake designer sunglasses and watches, made in China and ferried down the Mehkong. There were souvenir Beer Lao t-shirts too. It was nice to see some different, less mass produced stuff on sale alongside the tourist-tat. Maybe one day we'll come back with a long shopping list and a big wad of dollars. For dinner we chose a very popular restaurant overlooking the night market and drank Beer Lao as the sun went down.

Cruise down the Mehkong

Crossing the Mehkong to Laos [Enlarge]

Only the tourists and chickens were awake at 05:45 when we went downstairs for breakfast at the Chiang Saen River Hill Hotel. By 06:15 we were outside in the still-dark street stepping over sleeping dogs to reach the waiting fleet of MPVs. The vehicles set off whenever they were full and we were the first one to leave. By the time we had travelled for an hour downriver to the border town of Chiang Khong, we had been overtaken by several of the other MPVs, because our driver didn't understand that you need to change down to a lower gear to go up steep hills. By about half past seven we were all standing outside the Thai border post, only half awake. The office wasn't due to open until eight, but the hotel tour manager told us that he had a special arrangement and our passports would be getting stamped as he spoke. We were sent down the hill, still passportless, to the river bank—where we were parted from our bag as people and luggage were loaded onto different longtail boats to cross the Mehkong to the Laos side. Once everyone had arrived on the other side and the bags had been unloaded, our passports materialised and were handed through the window en masse. We got them back complete with their Laos visas, and then individually queued at the immigration window to get our entry stamps. A Laos visa and immigration 'stamp' is a work of art, carefully constructed by the issuing officials who need to apply no fewer than ten individual rubber stamps, in two colours, across a double-page spread in the passport to define exactly what each person's entry conditions are. Border guards the world over must dream of being Laotian and getting to do that much stamping.

We walked up the hill into Huayxai to where another MPV was waiting to whisk us a few hundred metres to the river boat on which we would be cruising to Luang Prabang in the Laos interior. There was no pier or jetty; we boarded the boat via a plank from the muddy beach. One of the other passengers had broken her ankle and was on crutches so she was lifted on board. We must say it was a slick operation on the part of the hotel; everything working perfectly and just in time.

Our 'luxury' boat didn't quite look like it had done in the photograph, but it had comfortable seats that had obviously been scavenged from a minibus—and most of them were attached to the floor. There was a bar area selling hot drinks, Pepsi and Beer Lao. The moment the boat started moving it got very cold on board—we found out just what other travellers' huge rucksacks actually contain, as fleeces, jackets, scarves and blankets were produced from the bottom of the bags. We had to make do with putting our shirts on over our T-shirts, but we were assured that by 10:30 or so the sun would be working its magic and we would be wishing it was cool again. Several of the group, which consisted of about 25 people in total, were in the mood for a Beer Lao even though it was not even 09:00. We weren't quite ready for a beer yet so we had a coffee instead.

As we made a left turn to follow the river away from the Thai-Lao border into the heart of Laos, the landscape slipped serenely past us: the jungle-clad cliffs looked like the setting for Jurassic Park or King Kong. We passed tiny isolated villages of bamboo stilt houses, with neither power lines nor roads connecting them to the outside world. Until recently, the waterways were Laos's only feasible means of communication—they are only just beginning to be surpassed by the roads which are being surfaced and widened. Although changing rapidly, the Lao People's Democratic Republic is still extremely poor and underdeveloped outside the main cities—the first printing press only arrived in the country in 1957.

Stop at Pak Beng, Mehkong cruise [Enlarge]

Late February is towards the end of the dry season, so the water level was very low. The level of the 'high water' line during the monsoon season was clearly visible on the river banks and we estimated it was at least twenty metres above our heads. The river banks mostly consisted of tall, steeply sloping beaches of fine sand. Hundreds of sandbanks, rocks and islands divided the river into alternative channels. Several times the boat was shaken by strong rapids, currents and whirlpools, through which the skipper had to plot a skilful course. We could see why the speedboats are such a risky option.

At about 10:30 we couldn't resist our hotel-supplied packed lunches any longer (it was almost five hours since breakfast, after all). Our big white cake boxes held fried chicken, sandwiches, a hard-boiled egg, some raisin bread, a banana, a satsuma, a carton of iced green tea and two tiny plastic bags, one containing a brownish powder and one filled with white granules. Someone wondered whether we had all been set up as drugs mules by a sophisticated cross-border smuggling ring, but harmlessly they turned out to be pepper and salt. Apart from the cheese (which was that prefabricated rubbery stuff that has 'cheese' listed as one of its ingredients), it was not a bad packed lunch! By 11:00 most of the lunch was gone and Glenn felt that it was not unacceptably early to partake of his first Beer Lao. We had heard good things about Beer Lao. It is only produced in Laos, never under license in other countries and although it is now being exported we had never had the opportunity to taste it before. It tastes mellower and a lot less chemical than Thai Singha.

Being on a boat with no local people apart from the crew, with a good stock of beer and some pretty crummy music playing on the sound system at the back, was not the way we had originally wanted to travel down the Mehkong. But given that the alternatives were to be pummelled on a speedboat for six hours, or to squat between chicken crates for two days on a local boat, we reckon we made the right choice. And doing it this way meant that we hopefully wouldn't catch deafness or bird flu.

We briefly moored up in the isolated village of Pak Beng, roughly the halfway point, where one of the crew ran up the hill to get a stamp in the boat's log book… and fetched another case of Beer Lao. If we'd been on the slow slowboat this would have been our overnight stop. It didn't look too bad, but we were glad to be pushing on towards Luang Prabang. It was 14:00, and if this was half way we needed to get a move on. The tour company's poster had advertised our arrival time as 17:00, but when we'd asked yesterday evening we were told that we would arrive between 18:30 and 19:00. Tour company posters, we have found, almost always lie about arrival times so that you're not put off. It was now clear that we were not even going to make the later estimate. The sun was due to set at 18:14 (another cool ferature of the GPS is telling you local sunrise and sunset times), so it would be fully dark long before we got to Luang Prabang. As the Mehkong is too dangerous for boats to travel at night, we wondered what would happen. Would we pull over to the nearest river bank and make camp under the stars? The beer drinkers certainly wouldn't go thirsty.

Mehkong cruise [Enlarge]

We continued down river admiring the beautiful Laos countryside as the sun got lower in the sky, the light illuminating the trees became golden and the shadows lengthened. At low latitudes it gets dark very quickly once the sun sets and by about 19:00 it had got so dark that the skipper and his mate couldn't see anything out of the front of the boat. One of the crew went back to the engine room and fetched a torch. He then stood at the front of the boat and used it to try to pick out the rocks. We were curious as to why they had chosen to put the only electric light on the boat in the toilet! So the last three quarters of an hour of the journey was spent under the stars and a half moon, just the occasional bonfire lighting up the jungle as we passed. There was a slight edginess on board as we all hoped the skipper's knowledge of the river wasn't going to let him down. We were all relieved when we saw the lights of Laos's ancient capital and present day second city beginning to line the south bank of the river, having gone for so long in total darkness. The folk of Luang Prabang had certainly gone to town with the decorations. The whole of the waterfront was a mass of lights prompting one of the group to wittily dub the place Laos Vegas. We moored up between two other boats and again in the absence of a jetty the only way onto dry land was to walk a plank across to another boat, and then down onto the muddy beach. We hope the girl on crutches made it!

We shouldered our bag and walked up the steep access road into the town centre to find our guest house, booked on Hostelworld the previous evening. It was at the far end off Luang Prabang and wasn't easy to find. Our room was small and had no AC, but the bathroom was very clean and it was only USD 12 a night. Everything was fine, until we pulled the bed covers back and saw hundreds of tiny brown dots hopping about. The bed was full of fleas. We went straight back out into town to look for somewhere else—we had passed a nice looking place on the way to our booked guest house so we decided to try there first. It was more expensive but they did have a room available, for one night only. We will have to find somewhere else for tomorrow night. After failing to find any wildlife in our new room, we went back out for our first taste of Laos food in a nearby restaurant and found it to be very different to Thai: drier, less spicy, but with harsher and earthier flavours. And virtually all the dishes seemed to be built around 'Mehkong weed' which, given the colour of the river, was a bit offputting. Their beer is better than Singha though!

Day 091
Chiang Saen to Luang Prabang

This map shows the route we took in this post. Click it to see larger maps of our whole route at flickr.

Maps are taken from the CIA World Factbook.