Thailand to Laos

Our end of year holiday began with a late night flight into Thailand - we arrived at 1.20 in the morning, and after clearing luggage and immigration it was the middle of the night - we were very happy to find our hotel transfer driver waiting with my name on a paper!

A good nights sleep in an airport hotel set us up, and we got a taxi to the skytrain to go all the way to the other side of Bangkok to the Hua Lamphong Train station.  We bought tickets and put our bags into left luggage and set off to explore Chinatown.

Hua Lamphong

Somehow we got a bit lost, and managed to find the more industrial side of town - fascinating!

We did find the river, and a temple eventually.

We wanted to visit the Grand Palace, but it was closed for tourists as part of the celebrations for the King's birthday, so instead we went to a big market - veg and flowers. So many orchids and marigolds!

 

 

 

Holland potatoes - from China

 

We stopped for a break and watched several groups of girls and boys practicing their moves - not quite cheer-leading, and not quite dancing.  Intriguing.

With some difficulty we got a taxi back to the train station - we'd walked much further than we'd realised, so the ridiculous amounts the tuk tuk drivers had been asking didn't seem quite as outrageous (but they were still more than the metered taxi we took).

So armed with snacks we got on the night train to Nong Khai

the chairs convert into bottom bunk

breakfast in bed

in the morning

It was a pretty reasonable night - nearly all our fellow 2nd Class A/C passengers were tourists like us, and the staff were very efficient at coming and making up our beds.

Sadly the train from Thailand doesn't go all the way to Vientiane - we arrived in Nong Khang and had to buy a train ticket to Thangaleng in Laos.  We also bought and overpriced shared taxi ticket, since Thangaleng is still 13km from Vientiane and is pretty much in the middle of nowhere.  This wasn't as complicated as it sounds, as there was a train full of fellow travellers doing the same thing.  We exited Thailand, and got on a small local train which would take us over the Friendship Bridge into Laos

Thangaleng - Vientiene

Friendship bridge

At Thangaleng we joined a queue to get our Visa - $35 per person, plus $1 each as it was Sunday! funny how the extra $2 weren't on the receipt. We had to wait while the visa were processed and were kindly given someone else's passports, so apparently we look very young, as the other travellers were in their 20s still. We got into a shared taxi bus which would take us into Vientiane.

(There are flights from Bangkok to Vientiane, and cheap ones - we just wanted the journey to be part of the adventure)