Ugh

Our next stop was Phitsanulok, which sounded much better in the guide book than it actually was.  When we arrived after the hour-long bus ride, we checked into the “Guest House Hotell” and set out in the blistering heat to look for a bookstore that we never found; have lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant, where I accidentally ate some kind of dried, shaved pork (weird); walk around some more in search of the Buddha casting factory, which we never found, and the bird park, which we also never found.  Phitsanulok didn’t do a very good job with their tourism industry; we couldn’t find a map anywhere!  We did go to Wat Phra Si Ratana, a famous temple, but I think we’d had our fill of wats by that point.  After dinner, we walked by all the street vendors selling food beneath a full moon, which was very bright for a city sky.

The following day was actually even worse.  We took a tuk tuk to the bus station; the tuk tuk was a carriage hooked on to a bike.  Not a motorbike—just a bike.  There was barely enough room for the two of us in the carriage, and our backpacks hung precariously from an S-hook on the back of the carriage.  We had breakfast at the bus station and got on a late morning bus to Udan Thani.  This is my number one recommendation to anyone traveling to Udan Thani: get there early so you can catch the next bus.  We failed to do this.  We therefore had to spend the night in Udan Thani.

Why wouldn’t you want to spend the night in Udan Thani, you ask?  Though the town is a transportation hub, with three major bus stations, it is also the capital of sex tourism.  Therefore, everywhere you look, there are fat, old, white men—the ones who wear white socks with sandals and have giant beer bellies—walking around with beautiful young Thai women.  It was utterly depressing.  Every place in that town was shady.  We even had trouble finding places to eat.  We also had trouble finding a place to stay.  A young man took us around the city in his tuk tuk, which was motorbike driven, to hotel after hotel, looking for a place we could stay, his brakes squealing like a dying animal the whole time.  Finally, we found a place that had room.  It was expensive for what it was.  It was the first place we stayed that had a squat toilet; the sink didn’t have a drain, so when you ran water, it just ran straight to the floor and drained from there; there was a cockroach in the bathroom; and the sheets on the beds had clearly never been changed.  Not wanting to spend any time in that room, we left for dinner and then walked around a night market, which was more like a mall.  It was an equally depressing place because tons of puppies were locked away in small cages, waiting to be sold.  When it was time to sleep, we walked back to our room.  Malone and I shared what looked like the cleaner bed and we spent what was probably the worst night of the trip.

Our third miserable day started early in the morning when we got on a bus to Vientiane, Laos.  On our way to the border, the bus stopped along the side of the road; somebody took our backpacks out of the storage area of the bus, and a man pointed at us through the window and told us to get off.  Confused, we got off, and a tuk tuk driver took us to a building where we could get our Laos visas.  The problem with this was that we were pretty sure we could get our visas at the border, just as we had when we arrived in Thailand.  However, we had been kicked off the bus, didn’t know where we were in relation to the border, and didn’t really know how to ask.  We sat there, aware that we were being ripped off, and handed over our passports to the woman behind the desk, who filled our a few forms for us and charged us between seventy and eighty dollars for the process.  Two women then got into the tuk tuk with us, which took us to the border, and we felt our stomachs sink when they marched us up to the “Visa Upon Arrival” sign and handed us $36 each—the cost of the Laos visa.  That’s right—we paid almost $80 for a $36 visa and a $1 bus ride across the Friendship Bridge between Thailand and Laos.  We were angry, so angry—but there was nothing we could do at that point.  The Lao official at the counter lightened the mood a little by making fun of us for what had happened.  I bet he sees it all the time.  We learned our lesson, though, and wouldn’t be fooled again, though the Thai people would try to do the same at the Cambodian border and at the Malaysian border—and get this—the Malaysian visa is free!

From the bus station in Vientiane, the capital of Laos, we found ourselves in another sketchy situation.  We tried to arrange a mini-bus ride to Vang Vieng, and we followed around a couple of men who kept arguing with each other and handing each other money, until finally one of them took us to his mini-van.  Somewhat terrified, wondering where we would be taken, we finally relaxed (though Malone got super car sick) and eventually arrived in Vang Vieng, where we were taken to a somewhat pricey bungalow that afforded a beautiful sunset view.  The peacefulness of the Nam Song River and the beauty of the sunset between the limestone karst mountains relaxed us and prepared us to enjoy a beautiful place in the coming days.