The flight to Bangkok was pretty non eventful really, it was with Thai Airways which have always had a good reputation although I was surprised they didn’t have seatback entertainment, there I was planning on catching up on loads of movies!
What I seem to have missed when booking the flights was a layover in Bangkok for 5 hours! Now this doesn’t seem that long on the face of it but when you’ve been up all night, not slept on the flight and managed to walk around the entire of Bangkok airport and all its shops in 5 mins it can seem like a nightmare, and it was a bit! I did manage to find myself a sofa though and get an hours sleep so not the end of the world.
I got into Vientiane having been on the go for over 24 hours, I was feeling pretty wiped so not particularly over the moon when I got to my hotel to find they had no record of my booking. As good as my planning gets is that I always book the first nights accommodation at the start of every trip where I try and have a private room and just recover from the flight and jet lag and after that I don’t really mind.
So no record of my booking, fortunately I had a copy of it but even with that they didn’t seem to think I was staying there. After several phone calls backwards and forwards to their manager they managed to find me a room, a double room though, which while very nice I knew was more expensive than I had paid.........more of this later!!
Despite being shattered I headed out into the town to have a look around and get my bearings a bit, oh and also get some money! So even though I had only decided on the location of this year’s trip at the weekend I had actually (for me) managed to read a fair bit of the book, where to go, what to do, money etc etc. At least I thought I had. I had read that each of the three countries uses US dollars and I thought that Laos used predominantly dollar, NOPE!
So I’m in Laos for the first time on the first day having been on the go for 24 hours having had to wait 30 mins to get the room sorted and I didn’t even have a few thousand Laos kip for a bottle of water, it’s getting late in the day and the chance of finding somewhere to change money is seemingly quickly disappearing. What I did find was a couple of ATMs so I thought here’s a great chance to use the useless card I had signed up for at Heathrow airport, so far so very very useless! I tried three ATMs all of which say they don’t accept the card or can’t contact the bank! Perfect (or obviously not!) I have $200 dollars on it which I can’t get off. I’m sure they’ll be more to this story also!
In the end thankfully I managed to find a small exchange booth to change up some money, I have no idea how much, the currency is in several thousands and beyond me at the mo, at least now I can eat and get some water though! ;-))
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