We were nicely woken by the sultry tones of
Whitney again at around 7am. We were meant to get to Nong Khai at 8:30am so we
hadn’t bought any breakfast the night before – and didn’t on the train as it
looked really expensive and shitty. Little did we know however that the train
was running almost two hours late – and by that time we realised the restaurant
carriage was shut so as we pulled up we were both starving!
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| Wat Si Saket Temple in Vientiane |
The big train doesn’t yet run all the way
into Vientiane – the Laos capital, so you have to disembark at Nong Khai where
you buy a ticket for the smaller shuttle train and get stamped out of Thailand.
You arrive after about 15 minutes at a small station/building in the middle of
no-mans-land where you have to fill out the visa forms, pay your money ($35US
each!) and wait for them to stamp your passport. Visas on arrival are always a
bit nervous as you are pretty vulnerable to overcharging or worse – rejection
for some reason, but fortunately we made it through ok and headed for the exit.
There was a tuk tuk cartel sat waiting and seemed to be our only option as we
were 7km out of the city. As luck would have it – an English couple were
haggling with them as we arrived, so we halved the fare and shared one. They
were funny – she was in her late 50s and from Essex, and reminded us of Gavin’s
Mum from Gavin and Stacey. He was about the same age and an ex-London Cab
driver – you could tell from his surly demenour that he’d done it for 30 years,
although travelling seemed to have relaxed them both – especially as within 5
minutes of talking to them they were telling us all about the happy pizzas
they’d had in Cambodia! They were a right couple of old stoners and proceeded
to tell us all the places it had been easy to get weed, and where we should
avoid it – and also about the ‘duty free’ islands in Malaysia where they had
spent a considerable about of time!
We were on the road for roughly 10 minutes
before the tuk tuk broke down. It backfired a few times and just died on a
fairly busy road. We were still 4km out of town, and had already paid so
walking was out – he made a few attempts to fix it, then gave up and called his
mate who came and got us.
Off to a good start with travelling in
Laos!
Neither of us really knew what to expect
from Vientiane – it’s the capital city, but didn’t look very large on the map
and there wasn’t a whole lot of accommodation options in our price range. Laos
is still a very poor country, so the drive in was through dusty shanty towns
similar to what we’d seen in the remote areas of Cambodia and Vietnam. We
eventually pulled up at the street we were staying on and hopped out into a
swelteringly hot sun (we checked later on and it was 36 degrees with 96%
humidity).
We’d pre-booked a place and headed straight
there – the other guys hadn’t so came with us to check it out. We got a room on
the 5th floor (there was a lift fortunately!), with no wifi as it
was out of range from the reception. By the time we figured that out and tried
to change it, they’d sold it to Roger and…. Sandra? I’ve totally forgotten her
name, but it was something typically Essex. The guys at reception didn’t speak
much English and were pretty useless so our requests to potentially have the
next night nearer the wifi so we could plan our onward route fell on deaf ears.
We decided to sleep on it and reassess in
the morning. It was now about 1pm and we still hadn’t eaten so we ventured out
to find a café with wifi and a sandwich menu. Due to Laos previously being
under French control, again we were fairly spoiled for choice and there were
bakeries, patisseries and cafes everywhere – although they were all EXPENSIVE!
After a hearty feed we went and checked out
a temple just up the road which was pretty cool – it had hundreds of buddhas of
various shapes and sizes dotted around, including in little hollows all up the
walls. It seemed even hotter once we left there so we retreated to the comfort
of our air-conditioned room to hide until sunset.
Once it had cooled down a little out there
we walked down to the riverfront to catch the sun going down over the Mekong –
it looked rather good and was nice and relaxing sitting there in the breeze.
There was a night market going on, so we strolled through and grabbed a couple
of things before heading back to our street for some food. We got sidetracked
with a speakeasy style cocktail bar en route called the Jazzy Brick - it was
like something straight out of a Melbourne laneway, and although it was a bit
pricey the bartender gave us an unadvertised happy hour for chatting to him so
we stayed for ages.
After that we thought we should have a
cheap dinner and went to one of the many street food stalls lining the road of
our hotel – we had BBQ chicken and sticky rice, both were amazeballs. We ran
into Roger who was drunk and scouring the streets in search of a smoke,
fortunately he didn’t join us for dinner as his ladyfriend had taken ill (i.e.
taken the wrong medication whilst drunk) and we retired fairly early for a horrible
nights sleep in possibly the most uncomfortable bed yet.
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| The night markets on the riverfront |
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