Onward to Laos

The journey from Guilin to Kunming passed in a relatively sedate seven and a half hours. When we arrived at the station Mrs Cheery said, ‘come on guys let’s walk a bit, stretch our legs and get a taxi in a bit!’- downtown Kunming turned out to be deserted…

With a population in China approaching 1.5 billion you’d think there would be a taxi along a seven  kilometre stretch of the main highway?! None of us were hugely cheery by the time we’d lugged our much heavier rucksacks four kilometres and Theo, who hadn’t wanted to walk at all, was giving me the body language version of ‘f**k this/I told you so …we should have got a taxi at the station!’ …

…at least it wasn’t raining 🙂

When the frost had thawed a little (with about a kilometre to go) we started to wonder why were there eight lane highways and no people at all..? Various conspiracy theories helped us get through the next ten minutes and we were there…

We bought some great street food outside a university, the one small area where there were actually a few people gathered, ‘hey guys we wouldn’t have been able to buy this lovely fried rice if we’d been in a taxi’ did not make it pass my lips…I thought perhaps we had gone soft from staying in the same place for three weeks, but actually I think ‘soft’ might be a better option this particular piece of self inflicted torture.

Our train to Laos was leaving at 8.08 the next morning …an early start. I asked the hotel to order us a taxi for the next morning and she said I ‘tomorrow, tomorrow!’ so we ate our rice and went to bed.

It was dark at 6.30 the next morning when I emerged from the stairs to discover no receptionist…I shouted s bit and someone eventually came after ten minutes, he did try to book a taxi but there weren’t any available …in a city of over two million people?!

He suggested we used the metro which was literally at the end of the street. We had no other choice so down we went, new experiences at 6.40 in the morning are our families jam, sticky! Definitely when our family is at its best! Perhaps not s fully accurate picture but we stumbled our way through it – working out where we had to change, and why our tickets didn’t work at the end when we were trying to get out…and where the actual entrance to the international railway station was…(we did love the colour coded tube trains though – so funky!)

We were in a state of slight disarray when we eventually arrived at the ‘put all your stuff through the x-ray machine’ part of the proceedings and discovered we didn’t have the right ticket…we needed a paper ticket (….arghh – a paper ticket, really?) our looks of dumb incomprehension were enough to have the Chinese official reaching for her walkie talkie and a serene and quite glamorous higher ranking officer came to collect us. I had a brief skirmish with the woman who wanted to take my scissors away, not bloody likely! …she let me keep the scissors, and the serene officer very relaxedly escorted us to somewhere where we could be helped. They took my e-ticket number (we’d never needed it before but I had it ready by luck more than any understanding of how the international train to Laos operates) …it didn’t work and she just decided to issue us the tickets anyway…

Okay, so we were going to be able to get on the train but there was a lovely woman pointing repeatedly at a symbol on the wall and asking us a question …errr.

We found out what she was trying to tell us two hours later when we saw the men sitting next to us filling in online forms that looked like the ones I’d filled in to come into the country – it turns out China requires a health declaration form when you leave the country as well as when you come in and we had no Wi-Fi …the in bound forms had taken a good half an hour to complete and we were going to have to do it in the customs area between China and Laos…an area not known for its free Wi-Fi, how long did we have to get back on the train anyway?

We were given other Laos entry forms to complete and in my slight form overwhelm I pushed past all my horrible embarrassment and asked my neighbour if he could hotspot me, oh and get the QR code for me to scan via WeChat…not for the faint hearted this travelling lark!

He was really kind and his mate got the code – I’d finished all three in ten minutes…relief!

The process of going from China to Laos involved the issuing of a piece of paper to confirm we had completed our health check scan, four baggage scans, four passport checks, a thorough visa check and lots of waiting around, at one point the guy in front of me took a photo of the immigration sign and he was immediately pulled out of the line and taken off into a little room…it made getting into Russia look like putting the kettle on and sitting on the sofa waiting for it to boil!

Half way through all our checks Rosa scalded her hand. We were in a holding area waiting for the train to move the 400 metres to come and pick us up in no-man’s land and move us into Laos…she was having packet noodles and the hot water dispenser didn’t stop when she let go of the nozzle. She handled it brilliantly – we had bought a metal bowl for Theo when he had Covid and was only eating in his room, it came into its own keeping Rosa’s hand cool. We bought some cold water from the little platform shop and we managed to keep her hand in cold water through two more baggage checks and for the rest of the train journey…as we manouevered our slightly cumbersome way through the very last x-ray check the official decided to confiscate our little pen knife…it had survived all the way from England, through Turkish and Russian trains, the length of Kazakhstan and China and here, on the border with Laos, our little yellow pen knife was taken away. I don’t really want to tell you I cried a little, I guess I feel a bit silly crying over a small, slightly ugly, bright yellow pen knife:..how do I get attached to things? …maybe there’s a Buddhist monk in one of the temples in Luang Prabang who might be able to answer that…I

bought it as a stocking filler before Covid when I was dreaming of this trip quietly and mostly to myself, it was one of the first things I bought and it was bright yellow because Rosa was firmly identifying as a Hufflepuff at the time…me and that knife had history.

There was no arguing with the officials this time, we were done, it was gone into the unknowable depths of confiscated customs items. I said goodbye to the pen knife, and didn’t get a reply because it’s a pen knife, and finally we were getting back on the train.

From the train window we could see we were in a very different country – it was more tropical and clearly poorer. The houses were smaller and made of wood we didn’t see any industry at all in the two hours from the border to Luang Prabang (although there might have been some… I did fall asleep for part of the way).

The guesthouse owner was picking us up from the station but the Chinese time of arrival for the train was an hour later than we actually arrived because the clocks had gone back again. We sat in the tropical heat for a while and then I went for a walk around and discovered an ATM, the only other westerner who had arrived from China was trying to get money out as well and I asked him where he was from…Thomas was French and he had travelled overland from France! Our first meeting with someone as bonkers as us!!

We swapped stories and routes, we had lots in common, Europe, Turkey and Georgia, but he hadn’t been able to get a visa for Russia so he’d had to fly into Azerbaijan and get the boat across…one option for our route home and it was good to hear it wasn’t too hideous!

We gave him a lift into town and arrived at our home for the next five days. What did I know about Luang Prabang? That it was a town not a city, that it was nestled between the mighty Mekong river and the smaller Nam Khan (actually I didn’t know that until the next day!) …in my mind it was a chance to reconnect with each other and as we had to go through Laos to get to my cousins in Thailand I had looked for somewhere beautiful to stop, and perhaps we find a little about this small and rather unfortunately named country.