Thailand --> Laos

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To the border...

After hearing some wonderful stories about the beauty that is Laos, and following careful planning of time frames and budgets, Dav and I decided to take a flying 5-day visit into Laos. Unfortunately all flights within a reasonable time frame were booked out, and so, still keen to go, we took perhaps the slightly less comfortable, and only slightly less expensive, route in...
Day 1 saw us squeezed into a minivan with 10 others and all our luggage for a 6 hour journey to a small town called Chiang Khong, separated by Laos by the mighty mighty Mekong River. The only saving grace was the bus was airconditioned...little to know that this was to be the most comfortable part of the journey...

The mighty mighty (uncomfortable) Mekong!

Day 2 was an early one (for us!), being ferried across the river into Laos at 8am. The Laos definitely have the hurry-up-and-wait mentality, with the whole visa and immigration process taking a good 2 hours... Finally we were taken in a tuk tuk down to the other pier in town where our 'speed-boat' awaited us, our chariot for the next 6 hours. It really did sound to good in theory - a nice speed boat cruise down the Mekong River to our stop for the night in Luang Prabang. It can hardly be summed up in words the sheer agony we were in for 6 whole hours - imagine sitting in a noisy, wet toboggan, with your knees up around your ears and a mere few centimeters to slightly shift your butt, redistributing weight so that pressure ulcers did not form! Haha - seriously, 3 days later it is only now starting to be funny!
Anyway, so we obviously made it, our driver skillfully maneuvering the high speed boat out of the way of debris and submerged rocks for the entire trip, and Luang Prabang was just lovely for the one night that we were there. The next day it was more travel, this time in an airconditioned bus for 5 hours down to Vang Vieng, that was just luxury let me tell you! And boy did we appreciate it!

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