End of Laos Expedition

Sala Hin Boun again in the morning sun. Breakfast was again a leisurely affair, and it felt as if the momentum for the trip has dwindled. It didn't help that we had to bring all our gear down the narrow staircase to load our boat one by one.

Despite yesterday's lesson on the estimate of distance on the river, we were all thoroughly relaxed on our last day of paddling, we're gonna reach there sooner or later right? Again, we only hope that we do not go past the rendezvous point with Soonthone. We did meet up with him easily after 5 hours of paddling till 3pm, though he caused us a bit of concern when we had to paddle past the village before we could see him. The boats were dismantled and we moved to Xoksay Guest House again for a comfortable night's stay. The coffee served during breakfast was much better too.

The next day, we travelled for 5 hours to Vientiane, and moved into this huge family suite in Saysouly Guest House which is essentially a 3-room flat.

Vientiane feels like little Bangkok to me, with much lesser people on the streets. Lots of caucasian tourists in berms walking around, and it turns out that in the evenings more came out in droves to dine and get drunk. We had a view of the Mekong across the street from this eatery, which was really huge and had this big sand bank at in the middle.

An impressive hotel we saw along the way; our accomodations does not look like this by the way.

Their cultural center, which looks really tacky with all that gold embellishments. Walking along the streets, we visited 2 bookshops, and that's about it. You really should patronise those fruit juice shops, they go for a dollar for each cup and you get real juice. We tried their baguette sandwich too, and decided to buy it for breakfast also.

Planning for the trip back to KL was an adventure in itself. That evening, David and TC chanced upon a sports equipment shop and bought golf equipment bags for cheap, intending to load the kayak parts in it to beat Airasia's silly rule on only allow golf equipments for sport equipment allowance. I rolled up my kayak skin with the sail and the seasock in it for carry-on luggage (it was ridiculously heavy), and check in all other things in the FC bag, and in the end it only costs me 3kg excess. JB wasn't that lucky though.

Back at KL, we figured that we couldn't take the connecting flight back to Singapore that way, and JB and I decided to take a coach back instead. We went to TC's place in KL and had a nice chicken dinner near his place before getting onto the coach ride...

...which only costs us 45 ringgit! It comes with a drink and a small cake and videos, and I spent the time on the road watching two and a half movies. JB is an idiot - he wasted time watching thrillers which he had watched before!

All in all, it was a nice trip, a great (costly) learning experience, and I hope that our next destination will be cheaper. I promise to bring 150% in excess of the budget that Huey calculated, lots of cable ties, my book and my fleece jacket. And some lighter fluid for David if he's coming along.