7 minutes in Laos

Last Wednesday our Thai visa exemption ran out:

Option 1: Get out of Thailand
Option 2: Go to Laos and get a new one

So we went to Laos. This might sound like a bit of an ordeal but it is actually about an hour and a half round trip from our apartment.

We ate breakfast, jumped into a tuk-tuk and within 10 minutes were out of Thailand. The bus over the Mekong took 5 minutes. It was all going too well.

We picked up our Laos visa application form then realised that there were no pens to be found and we had forgotten ours. How after all of our border crossings were we lacking a pen, I'll never know. No problem, there was a sign 'Pens 2000 kip'. So I went over to the pen sellers window, it was closed, I peered in, the lady was very carefully counting and marking off receipts. So I waited.... and waited.

After 5 minutes I went back over to Aimee who had spotted a local lady who was filling in her application. After some odd hand waving she let us borrow her pen just long enough to fill in the first sheet of the four. So I went back to the pen seller. Ten minutes later she was still counting the last few receipts but the end was in sight. I think my face probably did a spectacular about turn from delight when she got to the end of the pile to despair when she started to carefully select pairs of receipts, meticulously line them up then staple them. I gave up!

I was just lining up a Russian lady to ask for her pen when the receipt lady opened the window and 50 pence later I had a pen. In total we were waiting over half an hour for a pen. The wait to get the visa back was about 5 minutes, probably expedited by the $35 each processing fee.

We walked into Laos queued for 3 minutes to get an exit stamp and within minutes were back on a bus to Thailand, filled in the usual entry card, queued, got the stamp and were in a tuk-tuk back to the apartment.

Moral of the story, always bring a pen.