the day we walked from Vietnam to Laos, & back again!

Well the day started off okay. We caught the 6.30am public bus from Hue. Public bus means it is rammed to the rafters with people, boxes, cases, toys, sacks of rice etc then they put stools down the middle of the aisle and seat people on those too. so like I say its absolutely rammed full! The trip was supposed to be twelve hours and took us from Da Nang on the east coast of central Vietnam, across the country and straight across Laos to Savannakhet where we were staying on the eastern edge of Laos (where it borders with Thailand) so you can get the picture. We arrived at the border at about 11.00am. To be honest we were not even sure we could get in. There are so many different variations about what borders you could enter and what paperwork we would need when we got there, that we just hoped for the best. Laos is not a country we had even planned to visit and were really just wanting to pass through so we could get back down and get into Cambodia. To start with everything was going really well. We got off the bus and queued with the other brits to get our passports exit stamped on the Vietnam side. Then we had about a 200m walk in searing heat to go to the Laos border. The man behind the desk kept looking at Jody’s passport turning the pages and looking through it again. When he’d had a good old nosy through it, he told her she had to go back to Vietnam. Why? they had stamped the wrong date on her exit stamp! So off she went back to Vietnam, passing Bryan on the way. Check the date she told him. Guess what. Yep Bryan had the wrong stamp too. Luckily he had only just started to walk from one to the other but back we both went. We explained what they had done and asked them to re-stamp the exit stamp. No no no. that was much too professional for them. Lets get a biro and just write the correct date in on top! DOH! why didn’t we think of that? They would not re-stamp it and convinced that it wouldn’t be good enough for the Laos immigration, we set off back to Laos again. By now we were soaking wet from the heat and the long walk backwards and forwards. Laos man looked at it and smiled then gave us our visa and stamped it in our book. We were so relieved we had done it that we jumped back on the bus and flopped down in our seats before everybody else filled up the bus and made it difficult. We had a few minutes to spare while the bus filled up and Jody sat looking at her passport at her new visa. She had a niggle but couldn’ t quite grasp the thread of it. She looked from the vietnam visa & entry stamps to the Laos visa and .....no entry stamp! Bryan can you ask the Irish chap how many stamps they gave him a minute ago? Yep definitely more than us! Hang on driver don’t go yet please. We clambered across everybody trying to get to the front of the bus waving our passports around. We had been so focused on getting the visa sorted we completely forgot to go through immigration & passport control. Because we had been sent back & forwards from Vietnam to Laos, we were the last of the non local people to go through and therefore everyone else had been processed by the time we got to that stage so we didn’t even notice we were supposed to go to this other place. We now faced a crazy queue of people trying to get their passports stamped at immigration. We could see money being exchanged and wondered what on earth was going on. Our driver was trying to speed them up too (as by now the bus was quite late leaving) it was bedlam. How on earth they keep track of which passport belongs to who we’ll never know. Finally we got our passports back stamped and cleared. Relief! Back on the bus we did have a giggle about it but then thought how serious it could have been trying to leave Laos when we hadn’t been stamped in. We won’t forget that one again!!