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Wednesday (19th)We were woken early for breakfast before being taken to the Thai border. We were stamped out of Thailand and all taken to a little boat to cross the river to enter Laos! Once we got to the Laos border it was chaos! We filled in all the forms we needed to - handed it in with $35 and a passport photo. There were about 6 Laos people behind processing the visa's. They weren't doing it in any particular order so there were lots of people waiting for their passports! We did eventually get them back. We headed up to find out where to catch our slow boat. Directed to a travel office the lady began trying to persuade us to take the bus - that took 15 hours and we'd read and heard it was horrendous - so we said no! she was persistant! After about half an hour she finally gave up! She then told us that lunch was not included on the boat unlike what it said on our itinerary from the Bangkok tourist office!
We'd pretty much had enough by this point so I went and bought 2 rolls, drinks and snacks for the boat. We were then driven to where all the boats are docked and someone went off to buy our tickets. We headed down to the boat - it didn't actually look too bad! We'd bought some cushions as we'd been told that the wooden chairs gave you a serious numb bum but we had car chairs! It was about 10.15 when we got on the boat and nobody seemed to know what time we were actually departing - we suspected we'd leave once the boat was full and after waiting about 2 hours we were right!
We set off about 12.30pm , on a long slow boat. The scenery was beautiful. It took about 5 hours to reach our stop for the night (Pak Beng) We went off to find a bed for the night with a Swedish couple we'd got chatting to on the boat, we found somewhere for about £2, showered and changed and met the Swedish couple to head out for dinner, we decided on an indian which was very disappointing L Pak Beng is a pretty expensive place - it is the only place all slow boats stop for the night and as taking the slow boat is the most popular option (there is an option of a fast boat which takes 6 hours but so many people have died!!) it is a tourist trap. After dinner we had a few drinks then headed back to our 'hotel' to catch up on some sleep.
Thursday (20th) We stocked up on some rolls and snacks and headed for the boat about 9am. It was a different boat - a lot thinner than the last, lots more chairs and hardly any leg room. We set off about 10am. We stopped a lot to pick up and drop off the locals. We eventually arrived in Luang Prabang about 5pm, so happy to get off the boat, as beautiful as the scenery was we were beginning to get fed up of being on the boat! We walked to our accommodation; showered and chilled out before heading out to explore Luang Prabang!
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