HandelBlog | Chronicling the adventures of Sara and Jon

Laos is officially the Lao People’s Democratic Republic. I share this so you do not wonder what the heck PDR is when you see it everywhere you go in Laos as I did. And, you will go to Laos or at least you should.

Jon and I flew into Luang Prabang from Hanoi and after clearing the “arduous” customs and immigration process in the “giant” international airport, made it to our lodging right quick. Before we made it that far though we had an odd experience with an Uber. Jon ordered and Uber for us to take from our hotel in Hanoi to the airport. The airport is pretty far from downtown and I generally assume this is a good fare. However, after watching our Uber make maddeningly confusing turns seemingly away from us (why does this always seem to happen?!) he arrived only to refuse to take us to the airport because he didn’t have time. Luckily our hotel concierge was there to translate for us or we’d just think he didn’t like the look of us. Luckily our next driver was normal and happy to take us to the airport.

Luang Prabang is a UNESCO World Heritage Site with tons of Buddhist temples throughout the town. It is very picturesque with beautiful scenery and the confluence of the Mekong and Nam Khan rivers. We just spent time walking around, exploring temples and views. We opted not to take one of the ubiquitous tuk tuks to see waterfalls and elephants since we had plenty of uncomfortable road trips ahead.

Beer Lao – the best generic lager in SE Asia

The first leg of our trek through Laos was a mini-bus from Luang Prabang to Vang Vieng. Everything ran on “island time” which may also be considered “third world country time” or “you have no other options so just sit back and hope you eventually get where you mean to be going time”. We were picked up at 9:50 am by tuk tuk for transport to the bus station for a 10 am bus ride after being told to be ready for pickup at 9 am. We barely fit into the tuk tuk with the passengers already there, yet our next stop was to pick up more people! Somehow they squeezed in 8 people with luggage, lots of luggage. We made it to the bus station and found that there was no need to worry about the bus leaving without us since the ridership comprised the exact ridership of our tuk tuk. Surprisingly, we actually left for Vang Vieng not long after arriving at the bus station.

I was really nervous about feeling sick on the trip because it would be on a bus on windy roads that barely count as roads. Turns out, I didn’t need to be nervous about that, but instead, I should have been more wary of our fellow bus passengers or driver or ?? We stopped briefly to use the bathroom at a lookout point and for some reason Jon and I both left our bags on the bus, something we normally don’t do, so, of course, someone, either another passenger (most likely), the bus driver or someone else at the rest stop (least likely) took money out of Jon’s bag. We probably wouldn’t have noticed, but Jon wanted to get something from his bag and noticed his hat, which had been in the bag, was now out of the bag. He immediately checked through and found $100 US missing. So, as much as we tried not to, we ended up having to pay our rube tax.

Accuse the bus driver of stealing and you get to go to the tourist police to make a statement, vacation fun!

In Vang Vieng, we walked a couple of miles to our lodging just outside of the main town to work off some of the steam associated with being stolen from. By the time we got there, we were ready to relax and enjoy some Beer Lao in our lovely cottage.

We rented bikes at the hotel and took an amazing bike ride where I only cracked it/lost it for a little while. The hotel owner told us this was a “nice” ride which for some crazy reason I interpreted as meaning “not hard”. It was not only hard, but we went the opposite way around the loop we knew we were biking on so none of the landmarks made sense per the map we had. Jon figured out what had happened and calmed me down and we made it to this natural lagoon we thought we’d get to much earlier. The lagoon plus food was just the ticket to return me to full energy, enough to withstand a torrential rain, massive puddles and an incessantly bumpy rutted road all the way back.

Just setting off, so little mud on us at the time

No after pics because we were soaking and muddy

Sadly it was impossible to capture the amazingly bright bright green

One other thing of note in Vang Vieng, despite Laos being incredibly strict against drugs, there are pizza places that serve “happy” pizza (pizza with marijuana as a topping) and you can just order marijuana and opium to smoke from the (not so) “secret” menu. I had seen an Anthony Bourdain on Cambodia that referred to happy pizza so at least I knew it was a thing, but it was still pretty shocking to come across unintentionally as we did when craving pizza.

Our last stop in Laos was the capital, Vientiane. We took a bus from Vang Vieng to Vientiane and this time instead of having any money stolen, I just got plain old nauseous from the super bumpy bus ride on a full size bus with limited air conditioning. The highlight was our hotel pool which tells you a bit about the action in Vientiane. It’s a lovely city, there just isn’t much going on.

That’s Thailand on the other side of the river

Laos provided so many experiences that were out of my comfort zone and I am proud to have survived all of them and even enjoyed most of them!

Now that we’ve finished our tour of Laos, returned to Australia via Thailand, and flown to America, perhaps it is now time for me to write my post about our time in Vietnam? Seems reasonable.

Vietnam was the most complicated “visa” we had to get. Even with paying for a “visa approval letter” (which was the preferred route compared to mailing our passports to the Vietnam embassy in Australia before our trip) – on arrival in Ho Chi Minh City we presented our letter, photos and application and then waited patiently for 45 minutes or so to pay $25 for our visa and get our passports back. Then we walked over to the domestic terminal for our connecting flight.

One thing we quickly noticed about plane travel in Vietnam is that their airports do not have enough gates, which leads to taking a bus to the plane from the terminal. This is very annoying. Especially when the bus goes this far:

Our bus: far left, Our plane: right. Distance: not far

Our first stop in Vietnam was Danang. We chose this location to have some nice relaxing beach time between our temple and city touring. It did not disappoint. We had sunny hot days and miles of empty beaches.

Well, the beaches were empty during what I’d call regular beach times. Before 8am and after 4pm, it was an entirely different story, as seen below:

It took a while to get used to the constant honking of horns while walking around and also to figure out how to cross streets. The solution was to just start crossing when vaguely clear and the motorbikes and cars will sort of veer around you. Very terrifying.

Sara mentioned our food challenges when traveling and this was a bit amplified in Danang. It is not a major international tourist location as far as we could tell. Plenty of Vietnamese tourists though. They sold a lot of seafood that was presented in buckets still alive and given our lack of language skills we were not entirely certain what we’d get if we attempted to order. Also, nearly every restaurant on our beach front street was exactly the same. Additionally, google maps and the internet in general were not a great help. But hey, walking around looking for food, sometimes you find a dragon bridge.

We did a day trip to Hoi An, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It’s an old timey city that was not bombed during the war, so a lot of buildings remain from when it was a major trading port for all manors of countries.

Next stop was Cat Ba island. This was our most challenging transfer. From Danang it involved: Taxi, Plane, Uber, Bus, Bus, Boat, Bus and about 7 hours. And yes, we took an Uber in Vietnam – we were very excited it was available since we’d read a lot about dodgy taxis and various scams in Vietnam. With traffic, we were in the Uber for over an hour and the total came to about $17 for the 20 or so miles. Woo.

Once we arrived we were treated to a beautiful view from our hotel room.

Our main reason for going to Cat Ba was to do a tour of Halong / Lan Ha bay. It did not disappoint. The boat was quite dodgy, but the views were incredible (well, it could have been sunnier).

After Cat Ba, we were off to Hanoi for two nights. We did our trip back to the city in the reverse of the first one – Bus, Boat, Bus, Bus, Uber. Our time in Hanoi was spent eating good food and walking all over the city.

Vietnam was great. Upon reflection, it was surprisingly the cheapest place we were as well. Beers were only 12,000 dongs. While that may sound *really* expensive, the exchange rate was about 22,000:1.