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So today was the day of our 12 hour bus ride to Luang Prabang, Laos. We decided to have abit of a lie in due to the fact the bus didn't leave till 4 and we had that stupidly long bus journey ahead of us. We spent the morning stocking up on supplies, getting some cash out, passport photo's ready and packing.
We headed upto Bamboo Mexican to have some food before we left and ordered our sandwiches for the Journey. Cant go 12 hours without a few cheeky refreshments along the way. James had some chicken pizza bread and bacon and eggs on toast, I opted for two Nutella pancakes for lunch. How could I resist?? :-) nom nom nom. James went for ham salad and I went for jam sandwiches. Yeah I'm cool like that, but everyone has to admit they're awesome! We also grabbed a few brownies too.
With our bellies full we headed back down to 7 eleven to grab some drinks and crisps. Along the way we stopped in a little shop to get some passport photos done, UK size is 45 x 35mm so the ones Kara's dad done us were a little too big. They use 30 x 20mm at the border. We didn't fancy getting denied entry so didn't want to argue the case and got some anyways. They were 70 baht so around (£1.40) so pretty cheap but we now have a full collection of these so all the many other Visas we shall require.
We chilled at our guesthouse, made sure everything was fully charged and that we had our special tour name stickers on! Ha ha we had to wear these so that we got picked up by the correct bus guide. It wasn't long before he had turn up in his little tuk tuk and shuffled us in along with our bags. We went down to pick up the little woman we booked it with and headed off to the border. From what we have been reading online the border has been changed and is pretty new, they have built a new centre and bridge to speed things up. It was around 5 km away from Chiang Khong where we stayed the night. Once we arrived it was pretty quiet, we were shown to the immigration booth to get our passport stamped out of Thailand, once we had passed through we had technically become illegal immigrants! Our little guide passed us our bus tickets and told us someone would pick us up in Laos and take us to the bus station. This was all running smoothy :-) we had to wait around 15 minutes for the bus to leave Thai immigration and take us over to Laos immigration. We used this time to double check our visas and get everything ready. We chucked our bags onto the bus and got some seats for the 1km bridge crossing to Laos. We soon arrived and were shown to the Visa office, most people we faffing around filling in forms, but the bosses that we are were ready to rock. We handed over our forms, photos and passports and were asked to go to the next window. To describe this perfectly, the windows are next to each other just divided by a simple wall. I don't know why this is needed but obviously they feel it is necessary.
After waiting around 5-10 minutes, they man popped back up and asked for $36 each, they charge an extra dollar on weekends as an overtime rate lol. He handed back our passports with the biggest stamp/sticker ever in and we were sorted. We went through passport control, were stamped off and our little guide was waiting for us. He didn't speak much english and quickly got us over to the bus station, we went across some random wooden bridges. The looked like they were made from scaffolding planks, didn't look the safest tbh. Once we had rocked up at the bus station we were like the local eye candy, they love to stare at us. It was like we were celebrities. They had a toilet at the back of the station so I decided I would go before we got on the bus, the woman wanted 2000 kip (15p) for the privilege to wee in a hole on the floor then use a bucket to flush it myself, brilliant! We didn't actually have any kip at this point so paid her 20 baht (40p) instead.
We passed our bags to the drivers (there was 3 of them) and looked for some seats, Kara spotted the only two seats on the coach with the biggest legroom. The legroom difference was amazing compared to all the other seats. She bossed it! Everyone else soon got on, usual travelling hippie types, some french people, then the locals. Off we go then! Not that easy, bus had been sat there for around 45 minutes before we left, nobody thought it would be a good idea to fill up in that time. So this was first on the list, it was literally a 10 second drive from the station. We then had to wait 10 minutes for somebody to get on at a building site. He then decided to get off 2 minutes after we had finally got going. We couldn't understand what he was saying to the driver, but he didn't seem happy!
We were sat next to a girl who literally went straight to sleep, then an hour and a 1/2 into the journey decided to wake up and throw up. She threw it out the window and then continued to sleep? Brilliant! once we had got into a steady flow, we got out the MacBook and started to watch Marvel. The roads first of all didn't seem to bad, but this soon changed. For the whole journey I would say only 1/2 hour was good/fair road conditions! Most of the journey was in poor road conditions, climbing and descending a mountain/hill side road. If you were Jeremy Clarkson flying through in a Lambo with the road closed it would be great, in a 40 seater bus which has seen better days it wasn't too great. We had great views, but constantly felt like we were about to have a better one by being driven off the edge. If you have ever seen Ice Road Truckers deadliest roads, this is what it compared too. It gets dark quite soon here, so by 6:30 we were in darkness. I think this may have actually helped the situation but made it abit more terrifying for the passengers. The driver could now actually see the oncoming trucks and cars but we also got a great glimpse of them flying past. We stopped around 4 hours into the journey, dropped some people off and picked up a load more. Luckily the girl who was sick got off at this point.
To pass the time me and Kara decided to go through the Marvel series again, starting with Captain America and Iron man, this worked but with the poor road conditions it made it exciting trying to keep the MacBook straight. We stopped several times throughout the journey for toilet breaks etc, me and Kara had a few late night snacks along the way too. Neither of us felt comfortable to fall asleep as the roads just got worse and worse! We went from steep incline/decline on tarmac roads to dirt tracks with signs of land slides with steeper inclines and bigger drops each side. Britain's potholes are nothing compared to these conditions, so next time you moan about them, take the bus from Chiang Khong to Luang Prabang at night and let me know what you think. I can only describe as possibly like driving on mars.
The whole journey from start to finish was terrible, it took 14 hours in total. We had several near misses, a few skids and seen 3 trucks overturned. Thats excluding the transfer times to the border and going through immigration. It was one hell of an experience and one we will never forgot, but not something that I'm going to recommend doing on Trip Advisor. Once we arrived at the bus station we were greeted by several tuk tuk drivers, by this time we wanted to get to our guest house and into bed so jumped in the first one we could. We asked for a price and her said 20000 kip (£1.58) we asked for the price in baht, he came back with 9000 baht (£180) ha ha, we just settled with going to a cash machine in the end. This turned out to be a nightmare as he kept taking me to ATMs which wouldn't accept my card, after the 5th one we had a result. I paid him the money and off we went :-) this couldn't have been anymore difficult, we just wanted to get to bed. We quickly checked into our hotel after a little confusion with the booking, he was checking the dorm list instead of the private rooms one. We threw down our bags and got straight to sleep for a little nap. Our heads hitting the pillow has never felt so good :-)
Check out our blog tomorrow and see how we got on with our first day/night in Laos.
J&K over and out!
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