Vientiane to Nong Khai: Just Not Our Day

Waking up with incredibly sore shoulders is never very pleasant, but doing so knowing that you have to continue travelling is ten times worse. We had to wander around Vientiane for a good hour before we found the bus station to buy tickets to get to the border of Laos and Thailand. Side note about Vientiane: it’s just a big boring city that is very confusing. If you go there, the map in Lonely Planet will not help you navigate! Anyway, after being hopelessly lost and misdirected multiple times, we found it and headed to the Friendship Bridge. This was one of the highlights of the day: the Friendship Bridge is one of the few roads that connect Laos with Thailand across the Mekong River. In Laos, cars drive on the right side of the road and in Thailand, the left. So there is this big jumble of cars crossing over each other with drivers on both sides of the car that make for really great entertainment.

We made it safely to the Mut Mee Guest House in Nong Khai relatively unharmed and checked into a room. Our next order of business was to get some more baht as we had very little after dealing in kip for a week, and then head to the train station to buy our overnight tickets for the following night back to Bangkok. Well, this was quite a disaster. We rented bicycles, and with our janky map missing every other street name, not to mention the entire streets that were left off, and for the second time today got hopelessly lost. After an hour of pedaling around in the blazing midday heat, we finally saw a sign for the train station and followed it. We found it! Our excitement quickly dwindled when we realized we had forgotten to go to an ATM machine in all of our aimless cycling, and we seriously doubted we had enough cash for two tickets. Good news: we found at ATM right outside! Bad news: the machine rejected Justin’s card for some unknown reason, and other people were able to get money out. Really good news: we had just enough cash to buy two tickets (we biked away from the train station with 20 baht… about 75 cents in cash).

Train tickets purchased, we went in search of internet to call Justin’s bank from Skype to figure out the problem. Three stops and one hour later, we finally found wireless internet, but we didn’t realize that it was about 3 am in the States. No one to talk to. On a whim we stopped at 7-11 and miraculously got out cash. We were so excited that we bought beers with our new cash and went back to the guest house.

After waiting 45 minutes for a Mekong River cruise that didn’t happen, we walked along the river promenade and watched the sunset. We stopped at a bar with free wifi, got gin and tonics that I somehow spilled all over myself, and called the bank to sort things out. Further down the river, we stopped at an Issan style restaurant and ordered mystery meals that we had never heard of but turned out to be surprisingly delicious. And at the end of another long day, we went to bed under our mosquito net on the river.