A Day in Transit

I guess one of the unglamorous but necessary parts of travel is... well, the actual travel.  Our third day of vacation consisted of a lot of transit.  You could say we were trying to see how many different forms of transportation we could fit into one day.

We awoke on day 3 of our trip on the train as it was still rumbling toward Nong Khai.  As I remarked to Michael nearly three hours after the train was supposed to have arrived, "If this is 'express', I do not want to know what the 'local' is..."

The train was surprisingly comfortable.  The conductor comes and makes your bed when you are ready to sleep at night, then collects the dirty sheets and resets the bed in the morning when you awake - a nice perk I didn't expect.  We chose second class air conditioned beds, and I took the opportunity to scamper up to my top bunk like a rhesus monkey.  I particularly liked the bar car, the last car on the train, with its tired, fraying seats and the hot air filled with the murmurs of mingling foreigners and locals, sitting alongside companionably with cards, grub, beer and smokes. Unfortunately, the landscape was somewhat less inspiring.  We were out in the country now, and there seemed to stretch nothing except weedy fields, bare plains, or banana trees, with nary a human in sight.

view of the landscape from our train car

When we finally arrived in Nong Khai (three hours later than the supposed arrival time!) we boarded a small, stuffy train for about 70 cents to Thanaleng, which effectively brought us over the Thailand-Laos border.  Once in Thanaleng, we wedged ourselves in with the sweaty, dirty backpackers to fill out visa forms and applications.  A whopping 3,000 Thai Baht later (the equivalent of US$100), Michael and I had our visas and departed for the airport in Vientiane in an air-conditioned mini van.  At the airport counter, we were informed we could buy the tickets for 850,000 kip...but in cash.  While two million kip is not actually that much money in US dollars, it feels a little surreal to be pulling out a million cash of any currency from an ATM.  

We flew Lao Airlines to Luang Prabang on a turboprop plane.  It was my first time on a turboprop and I loved the propellers. The flight only took 40 minutes, but it would have taken approximately 8-9 hours to drive because of the winding, narrow, mountainous roads. The airport is small and one just walks out onto the runway (with the sole airplane waiting).  While safety had crossed my mind, I was pretty sure the plane and the pilot would be okay.  And I was right - I would argue that with the free bottled water and the freshly baked raisin rolls, Lao Airlines does a better job than most US domestic carriers.

When we arrived at the (even tinier) airport in Luang Prabang, the driver from our first hotel in Luang Prabang was there and waiting for us with a placard.  He ushered us into yet another minivan.  Finally, at 5:30 pm, we gratefully checked into our darling duplex hotel room overlooking the Mekong River.  At that point, all the transit felt worth it.

After desperately-needed showers, we headed out to explore.  Luang Prabang is a really small town and all the adjectives used to describe it - "treasure," "jewel," "cute," "charming", etc. - you get the idea - are spot on.  We felt like we were in a movie set because everything was so picturesque and so clean.  Even the dark could not disguise the fragrant frangipani trees, the cobbled paths, the teak wood houses with colorful, crooked shutters.

To round out the night, I got a traditional Lao massage for about US$9 (but thought it paled in comparison to the Thai massage I got in Bangkok).  For dinner, I "splurged" on a dish of river fish with vegetables in a local tangy soup.  It was really tasty.  Washing our meal down with the ubiquitous beerlao, we bid adieu to another satisfying day.