Dave and I are a little bit addicted to overseas travel, and, as many of you would know (especially if you have been following this blog for a while) we like to get to as many countries as possible. Dave keeps a list of countries, in alphabetical order, to track our progress.

 When we accepted the invitation to join my brother on his trip to Thailand, we looked at the surrounding countries to see if there was another one we could easily visit to add to our list. I am lagging behind Dave a bit (well he is older than me so he got a head start, haha) and while Dave already had countries starting with the letter L (Lesotho and Lebanon), I didn’t, so we chose Laos for a short side-stop on our Thai adventure.

Laos brings Dave’s tally to 86 countries. He only has the letter Y to go, which is a little challenging as the only country in the world (currently) starting with Y is Yemen.

After another decent free breakfast at the hotel in Phuket, we packed our bags and caught a taxi to the airport. For some reason the driver stopped along the way to pay his insurance (better than not I guess 😉 ) and we arrived at Phuket airport in plenty of time. They have a great system here, where even if you are not travelling on an international flight, but you have a connection to one, you pass through immigration and board from the international terminal. There were a half dozen or so ‘departing’ from international, so we were bussed at boarding time from that terminal across to the plane to meet the other passengers who were travelling domestically. Therefore when we arrived in Bangkok we didn’t have to go through immigration again or collect our bags before we changed planes for Laos. As I mentioned on Day 1, Bangkok airport is rather large. We had well over two hours to transit between flights and so we were taking things pretty easily. After getting something to eat and drink we decided it was probably best to find our gate and I’m glad we did – it took nearly half an hour to walk to Gate C2a and I don’t know if you can spot it in this picture – but both lanes of the moving walkways were going in the OTHER DIRECTION! Step count for today was over 10,000 again and considering we spent most of the day in taxis and planes, that’s not a bad effort! Now I have something to admit… yes, food loving friends, I know I usually set my eating standards pretty high… however, on this occasion it was Dave’s choice and so we had Burger King at the airport for lunch. I’ve also got to admit it was surprisingly pretty tasty, freshly made and certainly filled me up. But who can spot the issue here? (look closely at the menu board – might help if you know the currency conversion rate)

Our second flight for the day was another short one, just over an hour to Vientiane, the capital of Laos and right alongside the Mekong River, which also acts as the border between Laos and Thailand. We landed ahead of schedule and a simple immigration check of our pre-arranged visas, a quick bag pick up and an easy meeting of the transfer taxi meant we were on our way to the hotel at the time we were due to land! Not that I’m happy about the Coronavirus situation (of course!) but low crowd numbers travelling do have their advantages.

The hotel we are staying in is probably best described as ‘upmarket boutique’. There are only about 50 rooms and it is quite new, with a red wine theme. I’m not sure why! We were given a complimentary upgrade to their Pomerol suite which is a really lovely and very large room overlooking the Mekong River.  There was a complimentary bottle of red wine and the bath was filled with water and rose petals,  what a nice touch!

As we didn’t have a chance to get any Loatian cash at the airport we headed out for a walk after we unpacked. We wandered along the side of the Mekong, an area scattered with numerous river-side open air restaurants displaying raw (and extremely fresh looking) seafood, which is cooked over barbeques to order. We might try that tomorrow night?

After finding an ATM, and working out that 1,000,000 Kip equals only about $165 Australian, we headed back to the hotel and to bed.

Day 4 done and dusted and another country added to our list.

Anyone else count countries they have visited?