We got up right on time early in the morning and piled into Steve’s car for the ride into the airport. Julia’s boyfriend was coming in by plane after we left, so the timing worked out to be quite good. We made great time into Sydney airport, and we said some quick goodbyes as they dropped us off at international departures.
So now we were back on our own. It was easy to catch our flight out, and although it got quite bumpy near the end of the trip, overall it was an easy ride. I spent most of the time reading, and enjoyed two of Patrick Rothfuss’s novels. What a pleasure to read!
We killed three hours or so in Bangkok airport again. We have a lot of experience killing time (and beers) at this airport, so we knew exactly what to eat and where to eat it. It was just a 40 minute flight from Bangkok to Vientiane, the capital city of Laos.
On the flight we filled in a surprising amount of paperwork. During the past week we had been waiting for a confirmation from our hotel for the pickup at the airport, but we never heard back from them. We weren’t sure just how we’d get from the airport to the hotel, and the name of the hotel sounded a bit more like an apartment than a hotel, so we weren’t even sure there would be anyone there to check us in (similar to what happened to us in Zadar, Croatia). The suspense was building, flying into a new country, into the unknown.
In Laos, Japanese citizens are not required to have a visa, and so Kuniko went right through immigration. As an American citizen I had to buy a visa at the airport, using US dollars. I had everything prepared and ready, and the process was quite smooth. We got our suitcase, went outside the gate into the tiny airport, and luckily there was a hotel driver waiting for us with Kuniko’s name on a card. He drove us the short distance into town and we were relieved to find that we were staying in a real hotel with a real check-in counter and staff that even spoke English. Hooray!
Our hotel room was on the top floor of the six floor building, but we didn’t really have any energy to go out and explore the first night. We were arriving at almost ten pm, so we decided to go ahead and get some rest. The room was quite nice and certainly spacious, but it had some odd points. One thing was the shower was more like a closet. The shower door was an actual wooden door that you might found on the outside of a house – and I’m sure the water splashing will warp the door soon. The other thing that was notable was maybe the hardest bed I have ever slept on. I guess it is good for your lower back, but it was really, really hard. It took some getting used to.
We went to bed that night looking forward to getting to know the city a little better starting the next day.
