When we arrive in a new place we tend to take it in turns either staying with the bags or going off to find us a room. In Vientiane it was Mik's turn. Having been dropped off at the riverside we decided to stay in the area and so Mik went to three different places to check out the rooms and came back to report. All the rooms were fine apparently, but as one was larger than the others and had a balcony overlooking the river we went for this one. Upon entering the room I realised the pluses had blinded Mik to the fact that the bed was knackered and that there was no private bathroom. Hummm. But it was only for one night so I didn't stamp my feet! Although we won't be doing the 'bathroom down the hall' bit again if we can help it. Later we realised that we had also gone for this room over the others as it was only $6 compared to the $12 or $15 the others would have cost (with private bathroom of course!) Long gone are the days in Vietnam where we thought nothing of spending $15 a night, in fact we usually insisted on it. It's not even that our budget doesn't allow us to spend more - I guess we have just gotten used to keeping track of every dong, dollar, baht or kip. Either that or both of us would still rather spend any extra cash on food and beer!
Anyway, we spent the afternoon wandering round the capital of Laos, but as we had already been warned it's nothing to write home about. Dinner was good though (funny that we remember a meal), sitting in the food market, watching the sunset over the Mekong with a fellow Brit, a few beers and some lovely BBQ fish. In fact we only left when I started to get eaten alive my mozzers - grrrr. 9 bites in about 10 mins, and some of them were the biggest yet - NICE! I do look forward to the day when I can cover myself in perfume instead of mozzie spray before leaving the building!
The next morning we set off to make our own way back to Bangkok. What I mean is that we didn't just book a bus trip that would have taken us directly there. No, we decided to save ourselves another 14 hour overnight bus journey and cheat and fly instead! We did however suss out that flying a domestic route within Thailand would be a lot cheaper than from the capital of Laos to the capital of Thailand. So all we had to do was get ourselves across the border and to a city called Udon Thani. Easy. And actually it went surprisingly smoothly.
First negotiate tuk-tuk to the bus station. Must always look prepared to walk away if the price isn't right (although we bulging backpacks on your back it's quite difficult to do) so you get the best deal. Amazing the number of drivers who won't get out of bed/hammock for less than a quid...! OK. Arrived at the local bus station, now just had to work out which bus was headed in our direction. Hum, everything in Laotian - no clue. Luckily an inspector took pity on us and showed us exactly which bus we needed and where to buy the tickets - bless. Oh and the bus looked fab - newest one there, even looked like it might have aircon. It did. Lovely. We were the only westeners on it. Took us to the Laos border, off we piled, through passport control and back on the bus, across no mans land and onto the Thai border control, off the bus and through, back on the bus. All good fun. All the time watching out for anyone who appeared to be raiding the luggage compartment. Arrived in Udon Thani and went looking for somewhere to while away 5 hours til our plane left.
What we came across was a shopping centre. We then proceeded to spend the next 5 hours taking it in turns to wander what turned out to be a rather dull shopping centre but it was better than sitting on the street or at the airport. Negotiated a tuk-tuk to the airport - actually we didn't even bother haggling, he said 100 baht (about 1.30 quid) and we thought that sounded reasonable, even thought we had no clue how far it was to the airport! As it turned out I think we got a fair price. Caught the nice Air Asia flight and arrived in Bangkok just in time to find a room and head out for dinner.
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