Ben and Andy: Random Reunion We had to get up at like 5am for our flight from Bangkok to Udon Thani. We decided to fly there because 1. It cost only a little more than the sleeping train or bus would be 2. It was within an hour drive of the Thai-Lao Friendship Bridge at Nong Khai and Vientiane and 3. It saved us about 2 days of travel time by flying.
We said goodbye to Rob at the airport, his flight to Kuala Lumpur was just before ours, it was weird losing one of group members.
The flight was short but bumpy and we were all amazed we made that landing, haha. There was a Thai kid sitting next to Andy and I who had a big fancy Nikon camera. He took about a dozen shots of the wing of the plane. Then when we were about to land he pulled out a few sheets of paper stapled together; they contained his flight itinerary, and then photos of the next places he had to go! I only knew this because I’d seen the pictures online when I was figuring out how to get to the border from the airport. I guess you had to be there??
Next we hopped on a minibus and were taken to the border, went through the Thai checkpoint, took another bus across the bridge that goes over the Mekong, and then waited for our Visas on arrival. I had to pay the most- $42USD! Come on Canada, improve your Lao relations already! Lao is making a killing on Canadian travelers paying that extra $7USD, the English and Italians only had to pay $35! No fair! We can speak French for fuck’s sake!
Yeah, so we got another minibus into town and asked to be dropped off near the centre of town. Our plan was to get some food and see about bus times to Vang Vieng and Luang Prabang, we had a bit of a dilemma on our hands since the Air Asia website fucked up our booking: two of group ended up not being on the same flight as us and weren’t going to arrive in Udon Thani until nearly 6pm, meaning they wouldn’t even make it into Lao until like 8pm. We didn’t really know what we should do- should we spend a night in Vientiane or just meet them at our next destination? After only a couple minutes after being dropped off in town the answer to our problems was instantly solved… we ran into Ben! Like literally, ran into him. We’d just come around a corner and BAM! There he was. It was unreal. I’d been facebooking with him earlier in the week to see if our paths would cross but it looked like they wouldn’t, but then in a last minute decision we and his g/f decided they’d spend a few more nights in the Lao capital and try to meet up with us. Of course he wrote this on my facebook wall after I’d left my last internet connection so I wasn’t going to get that message until much later, so it was really by chance that we ran into him.
As soon as we saw him we knew we’d be staying the night so we dumped our stuff in a hotel room and went out to get on the Beer Lao. That’s how the rest of the day and night went. The other two in our group arrived with their only problem being a dumb Lao taxi driver.
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