29TH - 2ND DECEMBER

Our flight was on-time and we much to Rob’s delight we got breakfast even though our flight was only 50 minutes. We were very much looking forward to Laos as we had heard great reports about the place.
We shared a cab into Vientiane with a couple of French-Canadian women who turned out to be going to the same guest house as we wanted to go. You could pay for the cab in dollars which was handy seeing as we didn’t have any kip yet. You can only get kip within the country and can’t exchange it outside so we needed to sit down and try and work out how much we needed. The guest house was fine and thankfully had two spare rooms so we dumped our bags then went down to the restaurant for a drink before heading back upstairs and catching up on a couple of hours lost sleep.

When you enter Laos via the airport you

can only get a 15 day visa and we needed one for 17 days so after our little snooze we went to go and get our visas extended, get money and check out Vientiane. Yet again the money is bonkers! This time you get 17,000 to the pound and we needed an accurate amount so we wouldn’t end up with any left other. On advice from the bank man we used the cash point as this had a lower charge rate than if we did a cash advance. So after various workings out by Roberto he came up with the conclusion that we needed approximately 2 million kip but you could only draw out 1 million each day so with a very bulging wallet we made our way to the visa office. Extending our visa was no problem, we filled in the form, paid our money and our passports would be ready the next day, no hassle at all.

One thing that we had really noticed about Vientiane was how chilled and un-busy it was for a capital city, it was a