Jumping over to Laos

One of the slightly annoying things about living in Thailand as a foreigner is the occassional need to do "visa runs" to a bordering country. These are basically jumps over the border between Thailand and one of its neighboring nations, in order to replace an expiring Thai visa and legally continue living in the Land of Smiles. Border runs are just part of the "farang" routine, and can be done as easily or as painfully as you wish (or as your budget allows).

With the expiration of my Thai work visa last week, I was obliged to do the jump over international lines for the second time. Luckily my visa expired within a week of my boyfriend's, and we decided to make a little vacation around our mandatory trip to the Thai embassy in Vientiane, Laos.

Laos, if you haven't heard much about it, is an absolute gem of a country, running about 7 million strong in population. Many people compare it to the Thailand of twenty years ago, as much of the country is still awaiting the development that has been spreading in Thailand over the last couple decades. The people are warm, the roads are bumpy, and the fields are an amazing shade of almost-neon green. There is one beer brand available (Beer Lao, of course) and much of the rural population live in shacks that hover precariously above the dirt tracks below them. Although such homes display the poverty characteristic to many countries in this part of the world, Laos is a nation full of charm and mystery, with green mountains shrouded in whisps of white clouds. As we travelled the four hours by mini-van from Vientiane to Vang Vieng, a mountain town well-known for its river tubing and kayaking, I took a few mental snapshots that I'd like to write here:

- Number of times we had to stop to let cows, oxen, chickens, goats, dogs, cats, etc., etc. cross the road: 7
- Items used by village children as toys/game props: a piece of string, a pork rib bone, an old shoe, an empty beer bottle, a long stick, a chicken, a dog, a cat, etc., etc., their mother's hair, a large rock, a wagon wheel, and a broken-down tractor.
- Number of goats being herded from the fields by an old man on a bicycle: 8
- Number of times I thought we would crash head-on into another vehicle while attempting to overtake the person in front of us: countless
- Also, countless groups of workers in the rice paddies pulling grain by painstaking grain of rice out of the ground. After seeing this laborous process all over Asia, I never take my Kaow-pat-gai (chicken fried rice) for granted.
- Number of uniform-clad teenagers on the back of a pick-up truck that apparently doubles as a school bus: at least 20 (seriously. I have photographic proof of this one.)

Quite an exciting mini-van journey, if I do say so myself! The real highlight of the trip was our time in Vang Vieng, where we spent a day tubing down the river and meeting other foreigners in the bars and hangouts along the way down. The scenery was beautiful and the water was freezing, which always feels good in this intensely tropical climate. And after a long day on the river, you can go to any of the restaurants in town and they will be playing an episode of "Family Guy" or "Friends" on the big-screen TV. (Weird, but seems to be "the thing to do" if you are the owner of an eatery in this town.) After two days, we were forced to come back to Bangkok and resume the teaching routine once more, this time with fresh visa's stamped into our passports. All in all, I'd say these visa runs aren't such a bad thing to "have to" do.