Nong Khai

Nong Khai was our gateway to Laos – the small border town is the Thai home of the Friendship Bridge, the primary land link over the Mekong to Laos. It was built with Australian assistance a few years back. Because we weren’t sure about border proceedings or whether we would be delayed on route we planned to spend a couple of nights here before continuing on to Vientiane.

Our journey was uneventful, a mini-bus connected Udon Thani Airport arrivals direct to Nong Khai and the driver was kind enough to ring our hotel and get exact directions to drop us off. I was anticipating our hotel to be nice, but a bit of an ordeal as I’d only managed to find it via a forum link and their website was entirely in Thai. In reality it was more a novelty than nuisance, which was probably also true for the hotel owners who don’t seem to have had many if any non-Thai guests.

Luckily for us the lady owner’s daughters both spoke good English, albeit irritatingly (for a staunch Englishman) with an American accent. After some initial confusion about a double bed not meaning two of them, we settled into our brand new, sparkly clean room.

Seeing in the Chinese New Year with a beer at DD

That evening we headed to the DD restaurant on the recommendation of the hotel. Rater confusingly, but entirely justifiably many of the restaurants don’t have their names in Roman script. This makes it difficult to make sure that you are in the place that serves well cooked chicken noodles rather than undercooked, stale snake heads. Luckily for us Monali’s sixth sense was on form and we picked the right Thai scrawled sign for DD. The food was excellent, as was the atmosphere given the Chinese new year celebrations – good enough for a return visit the following evening.

On the Thai side of the Mekong - Laos waiting just across the water

The next day we surveyed the local market, found the post office and attempted to buy USD (essential for the Laos visa) from 4 different banks. We managed to get a total of $113 from two banks – that was it, we bought Nong Khai’s entire stock of USD, a town famous for the link with Laos where visa prices are in USD!! 

Our eventual entry into Laos was exceptionally easy other than having to lug two huge bags onto a very crammed bus that takes you over the river. Basically the Thai authorities stamp you out, you buy a ticket for the bus across the bridge on which the entire population of Nong Khai seems to descend, on arrival on the Laos side you ignore all the polite taxi touts while filling in the visa forms, handover 35 USD each and welcome to Laos!