Welcome to Laos....or not

So to recap...

The plan: 10am Saturday leave Chiang Mai for Chiang Khong (about 6 hours). Travel across the border into Huay Xai, Laos. Stay the night. 10am leave on the slowboat to Luang Prabang - this takes two days in total with an overnight stay at Pakbeng, arrive in LP at around 5pm on Monday.

The first stretch was pretty horrendous, lots of ridiculously winding roads, but we made it to Chiang Khong to be greeted with lots of confusion as to what was going on. Most of the people we travelled with were spending the evening on the Thai side of the border, but we had to get over to Laos or pay a fine for overstaying on our visa. This was all supposed to be fine when we booked through our hostel but the people here seemed a bit unsure about it. All the travel companies give you a little sticker saying where you are going to, and we were both given stickers saying to Luang Prabang by VIP bus - first off, we didn't even know there was a bus, it turns out it was substantially less than we had paid for the slowboat as the slowboat is supposed to be a bit of an attraction in itself. We explained that we booked the slowboat but he wouldn't give us a sticker for the slowboat, and just kept telling us to see his sister in Laos, show her our ticket and it would all get sorted. We protested, but conviniently he couldn't understand English after that.

We headed over the border (a minute long boat ride across the river) and pais for our Laos visa, with the extra overtime charge for arriving after 4pm etc. When we spoke to the guy from the travel agent in Laos he was trying to get us on the VIP bus. We kept explaining we were on the slowboat, and showed him our ticket, but he protested that if we had the VIP bus sticker then we must go on the VIP bus. We actually considered it for a bit because the VIP bus would have arrived in Luang Prabang the next morning, saving us a day and a half of travelling time. But since we paid the extra we thought we should stick with the slowboat, which also included some free accommodation that evening. Eventually the guy we were speaking to rang his boss and sorted out our accomodation, told us to meet him in front of our accomodation at 8.30am the next day.

Huay Xai, where we stayed, was a complete dump to be honest. I'm not sure if we were just in the wrong part but we walked for about an hour up and down the road with our hostel in search of a bar or restaurant but couldn't find a thing. Eventually we headed back to our hostel and thankfully they had a tv with sports channels so i got to watch the FA cup final which made me pretty happy!

The next morning we were basically waiting around for a couple of hours before anything had happened, eventually some of the guys who we travelled to Chiang Khong showed up having crossed the border that morning. We were taken in a tuk tuk for about 15 minutes to a place near where the slowboats departed - basically a little cafe/shop with a waiting area, where they were charging about 4 times the price of the places up the road. The currency in Laos is seriously confusing and I think they were trying to exploit the people that were new in town (like ourselves). After lots of waiting and more turning up we were finally given a bit of a briefing - the guy from the night before told us a couple of things to watch out for and emphasised his companies commitment to a good service, and hoped we would recommend them to our friends (which after how rude this guy had been was already laughable at this point) - he also encouraged everybody to pay in advance for his hostel at the stop off in Pakbeng .

About five minutes later he came over to us and said that unfortunately due to the rain, the slowboats had all been cancelled and we would either have to wait until tomorrow (and pay for an extra night - he recommended his hostel of course), or he could put us on the bus that evening. I won't labour through the details too much since the day was very long and drawn out - but basically the boats had left, and this guy we're pretty sure had never booked our tickets in the first place. If we all went on the bus then he could pocket the difference between the ticket for the slowboat and the ticket for the bus.

Essentially we all know we were being ripped off but there was absolutely nothing we could do about it, he had our money and we had no tickets, we either left and lost our money or let him rip us off. When we asked him he was just rude and told us if we wanted our money back we had to go back to Thailand where we paid the money (obviously knowing we couldn't do this). Anytime we tried to press on anything he just claimed to not understand - the guy was a complete pirate.

Eventually, not wanting to lose another day, we decided to get the bus to Luang Prabang that evening. Which was especially annoying since we could have done the same last night and already been there at that point. The silver lining was that we met some great people that we have spent the past week with, so I suppose there was something positive to come out of it.

Our bus arrived in Luang Prabang at 4am - nothing was happening, we had nowhere to go, we'd barely slept all night with the bus constantly going down winding roads and the driver playing some awful music really loud. The tuk-tuk drivers ripped us off to take us in to town - again we knew what was going on, but we had no alternative. We pulled up at our hostel which was all locked up - thankfully they had a bed and a chair out the front which we slept on for a couple of hours til we heard some noise - our room was ready so thankfully we could get to bed.

We've been in Laos for a week now - we'd all been told so much about how friendly the people of Laos were, but we're yet to see it. We have just been treated like walking ATMs everywhere we've been. People will smile and be friendly, then as soon as you pay for something they won't look you in the face. Again we had problems with travel when we booked a 12 person minivan from Luang Prabang to Vang Vieng, when the bus turned up with 11 seats the guy who booked it didn't want to know unless we paid extra money for an extra minivan. I'm not sure if this is all a result of being in touristy places but it has been getting a little tiring.

Laos itself is beautiful - we have loads of pictures but are really struggling to get up to date, I will post more about some actual places when the photos are up and I get the time. The currency here is crazy though, it's roughly 13,000kip to the pound. The biggest note is 50,000, and it's near impossible to tell 1,000, 2,000 and 10,000 notes apart - things get confusing quickly.


Tune