May 25th – Day 6 – Laundry, Laos and Lilypads

Today was quite an easy day – essentially a travel day.  I started with a 9am lie in, followed by almost missing the breakfast closing at 10am – I was the last person there when they closed! Oops!

After a brief breakfast, I popped down to the laundry to collect my 60 baht washing load.  It was really amazing to have everything washed, folded and packed for me for just over £1! As we were due to leave the hotel, I headed to the room and packed… It seems to be getting easier as the trip goes on (which is good, because there’s a lot more packing and unpacking to go!)

At 12:00 we had to check out from our rooms, so I headed down to meet and chat with others outside the hotel for an hour before we headed to the airport.  We were about to fly to Laos so it gave me a chance to read my guide book and clue up on Laos a little bit more.  I also remembered to take my first Malaron, anti malarial drug – nobody else on the trip is taking malarials but since the travel clinic advised it, I decided to go for it.  I read the potential side effects, and it says that 1 in 10 people react in some way… Watch this space!

At 1pm we headed to the airport to prepare for our 15:30 flight.  Chiang Mai airport is pretty small, and the Laos airline check in desk had 4 people handling our little flight check in – it seemed to be a case of each person had one job to do, including one guy who just picked up stuff from the printers and handed them to someone else.  Quite a strange arrangement but I guess it works as we were through check in very quickly.

Check in in Chiang Mai

After Check-In, Dek warned us that we should probably grab food before we headed through security so I headed off with Karl and Petra to find something suitable.  There were two options – Burger King or McDonalds. I checked my wallet and literally had 100 baht left (£2!) – excellent planning on the currency side, but it meant that I couldn’t buy anything more than a pack of French fries. Karl and Petra gave me 25 baht so that I could get together enough cash for my meal – thanks guys!

Once we’d had a brief meal, we went through the process of leaving Thailand – a departure form and a security check and we were through, ready to head to the gate.  Gate 9 in this case, where Dek was waiting with paperwork.  As Laos has a visa on arrival scheme, we had to fill out a visa form AND an arrival form – glad we got through there in plenty of time.

We boarded QV636 from Chiang Mai to Luang Prabang via a bus – it’s a little properller plane (ATR 72-600) and settled down for the short flight.  Lao Airlines are ‘ready to be a national carrier’ for Laos, but so far don’t have that status, but they were putting in the effort – a little box meal on a 45 minute flight, even if it was a nasty looking sandwich and a box of fruit.

Obligatory plane selfie

Lao airlines inflight meal

As we approached Luang Prabang, it was clear we were heading to a much smaller town – just 50,000 people live there.  The hills were filled with trees, rivers and a much more natural looking area than Bangkok or Chiang Mai.  I spotted the airport from the plane as we circled and it was tiny – just a runway and a tiny terminal building with what looked like one gate.

Chiang Mai from the air

Laung Prabang from the air

Our tiny ATR plane

Wasking to the terminal

After landing, we parked quite a distance from the terminal and were let off the plane.  There were no instructions, but people seemed to just walk towards the terminal, so we followed – the rules here are so relaxed about this sort of thing! We were lucky to be near the back of the plane (ATR planes deplane from the rear) so we got to the front of the immigration queue quickly.

The first stage of immigration into Laos was to obtain our visa on arrival.  This was a simple process when we had completed the form and photo in advance – simply a case of handing over our passport and forms, waiting a couple of minutes and going to a different window where we paid the $35 (plus $1 service fee) and obtained a properly printed visa in the passport!  Makes you wonder why so many countries take days or weeks to prepare visas!

After that, the immigration was straightforward – arrival form and baggage collection. Since it was a tiny flight and a tiny airport, the bags were there before we even got our visas.

My Lao visa

After we all regrouped, and the Canadians complained about their $42 visa (different countries have different costs), some people went to withdraw cash from ATMs.  Since I had USD I wanted to change, I had to wait till later to become a millionaire! In Lao, the currency is the Lao Kip and is worth approximately 8000 kip to 1 USD.  So to become a millionaire, you only need $120 – actually the recommended amount by Dek for our 3 day stay.

During our minibus ride to the hotel, Dek explained that Lao is one of 5 communist countries in the world, and the name here is PDR of Laos – which colloquially stands for People Don’t Rush! He warned us – don’t expect fast service anywhere!

We quickly arrived at our hotel, the Maison Dalaboa.  It’s a really cute boutique hotel next to a lily pond.  My room had a HUGE double bed and there was a lovely pool as well.  Once we checked in (and had another welcome drink), we were to meet at 7pm for dinner and a trip to yet another Night Market!

MAulson Dalabua

My huge hotel bed

Beautiful boutique hotel

Lilypond outside

Our dinner was at the Coconut Garden restaurant, a fairly nice place just through the Night Market.  On the way there we stopped at a foreign exchange booth and I changed $124 into 1,004,000 kip – making my briefly a millionaire!

Coconut Garden

Proof that I was briefly a millionaire

I ordered a pumpkin and coconut soup, steamed vegetables with a spicy tomato sauce and a Beer Lao – the local beer.  Service was predictably slow (PDR, after all!) and the restaurant was quite dark, but the food was tasty when it did come.

Beer Lao

Pumpkin and Coconut soup

Steamed Vegetables and spicy tomato dip

Local shop

After dinner we headed into a local shop to buy some water and some of the group wanted some night booze supplies. It had been a pretty calm day, but I feel like that’s probably the way of life in Laos. 

Looking forward to exploring tomorrow!