Siem Reap to Vientiane, via Savannakhet

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This morning we sampled the pancakes with syrup. They were yummy except for the fact that the batter had been poured over banana slices making them banana pancakes with syrup!!! Not to be deterred, I simply picked out all of the banana bits that offended my tastebuds!

After cleaning our teeth and packing our toilet bags we headed down to settle up our account for the last seven days. We had two lots of laundry done while we were here and we were blown away to find out that those services cost us US$1.75 plus US$2.00!! How cheap is that to have your laundry done??!! In fact, all of our incidental food, drink and laundry for seven days came to a grand total of US$58.25 the room itself having being paid for in full prior to our arrival. We put a reasonably sized tip in the tip box (a bit less than US$5.00/day) and gave the girl on the front desk another Australian wildlife calendar with a very cute Koala featured on the front.

When we checked in the woman on the desk told us that we weren’t actually in the system, but issued us with boarding passes anyway??? She told us that the pilot would have the list of passengers travelling on e-tickets when he arrived and they would let us know if there were any problems. On the whole she didn’t seem concerned so we decided not to waste any energy worrying about being bumped from the flight unless it actually happened.

When the flight boarded, only about half of the 72 available seats were occupied so there was no problem with us travelling to Vientiane today as planned!! Phew. From Siem Reap we flew to Savannakhet where we were processed into the country. We had organised passport photos for our visas, but we don’t know what became of them. We rather suspect that they are still at home somewhere after somehow or other not being packed in our wallet of travel documents and foreign currency????


Of course we realised in Siem Reap that we didn’t have the photos and should have done something about having more passport photos taken, but somehow that bright idea did not occur to us until we were standing in the queue to be processed for our visas to enter Laos. Our only excuse is that we have both been very sick and obviously this has quite addled our brains!!

Anyway, it is amazing what requirements can be waived as long as you are prepared to pay more money!!! It cost us just US$4.00 more to enter Laos without our photos. I suspect it would have cost us more than that to have passport photos taken in Siem Reap??? It took six people to process our entry into the country. The first official entered our details on a computer and he was the one who determined that we would have to pay US$32.00 each instead of US$30.00 because we had lost our photos.

The next official stuck our visas into our passports and then handed our passports to her colleague to notate our details onto the visa. The next official took our money with no cash register in sight!! She just had a fistful of cash and there was no evidence that there was any sort of till that was being used to reconcile the amount of money collected with the number of tourists entered at the end of the day??!! And no receipt was issued!

Our passports were handed back to us and we proceeded two steps to the right to the next desk where one official took our arrival cards and the next and final official actually stamped us into the country. All processed and without any drama despite being careless and forgetful and not having our photos. Unlike the French (?) girls preceding us who entered into a slanging match with the officials because (we think?) that the visas that they arranged before travelling to Laos had been entered into their old passports and they were not happy that they had to buy their visas again.

After handing our health survey cards (regarding possible H1N1 symptoms) to an official we were able to proceed to the transit lounge to await our ongoing leg to Vientiane. With a few extra passengers on board we enjoyed an entirely uneventful flight to Vientiane - unless you count the guy across the aisle from Bernie who somehow managed to explode his in-flight pastry snack from its cellophane package all over himself and his travelling companion!! At least exploding dry stuff does not go as far as exploding UHT milk and Bernie didn’t even get a crumb on him!!! I don’t know what it is about him attracting travellers who are packaging challenged on this trip??

And so we arrived in Vientiane for the main reason for undertaking this trip - to see my little sister, Kerry, while she is living here working for COPE. She had taken some time out of her busy schedule to collect us, take us to her house and then leave us to our own devices while she finished off her working day. With strict instructions not to use the air—con because it costs too much to run, we lazed around for the rest of the afternoon. Her house is elevated so, with the doors and windows open and the ceiling fans going it was actually quite pleasant inside despite it being nearly 40 degrees Celsius outside!!!

When Kerry arrived home we went into town. We booked massages for tomorrow morning and shopped for some groceries before eating at an Italian restaurant. Kerry says it was very expensive food by Vientiane standards, but we still thought that it was pretty cheap with the three of us eating for only US$31.00. Bernie and I had the lasagne which was just about the nicest lasagne (other than the one I make myself) I’ve ever eaten at an Italian restaurant anywhere in the world. Yum!

After dinner we took a tuk tuk back out to the ‘burbs where Kerry lives. It turns out that Kerry’s house is not actually in Vientiane, but in a village called Spangmor. Thanks to urban sprawl it is pretty difficult to tell where the ‘city’ ends and where the individual villages surrounding Vientiane begin and end??! No matter, it only takes about 10 minutes by tuk tuk to travel from downtown Vientiane to Kerry’s house.

The tuk tuks here in Laos are nowhere near as comfortable as the ones in Cambodia. In Cambodia the tuk tuk takes the form of a trailer with a forward facing seat wide enough to seat two people side by side, that is simply hitched on behind a motorbike. Here the tuk tuks are more of an integrated unit that is permanently attached to the motorbike. The seats are hideously uncomfortable troop carrier-style seats that run along the sides of the tuk tuk so that the passengers have to perch on the extremely narrow seats (that are not made for fat, ferang bottoms!) with knees touching in the middle!!

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