The worst three days…

I woke up full of resolve on that final day in Chiang Mai. I looked at my phone, 3.40 in the morning – early. Early was good, what to do first?

We had decided to go back to Luang Prabang for two days on the way back to China. The lack of train tickets away from Chiang Mai had meant we needed to leave Thailand a day early and created the time, I would get to see the monks walking barefoot through the streets at sunrise one more time.

I looked at the Laos train ticket app but bookings didn’t open until 6.30. Time to get those Russian train tickets.

Russian transit visa applications require five things.

1. Proof of your travel arrangements into the country
2. Proof of your travel arrangements out of the country
3. Hotel booking confirmation in each city you are staying in
4. A letter explaining why you want a transit visa and why the Russian authorities should give you one
5. Your Russian visa application form printed, signed and with a passport photo attached.

We had a copy of our letter from our first application and I had booked our bus tickets out of Russia when we were in Australia. By the end of that process I had a relationship that bordered on friendship with the ‘Chat’ icon on the TuTu ticket app. It had not been easy but each ‘why?’ ‘when?’ ‘what the…?’ I had sent through had been responded to within minutes, helping me to understand what was going on and why the app wasn’t working properly. It turned out there were some technical difficulties they needed to resolve and after some nifty work their end, and lots of patience at mine, we had triumphed.

This was different though – I was not booking a ticket from Russia to Georgia, the train we needed to catch was going from Kazakhstan into Russia, I was quietly confident it would be a simpler process…

Two frustrating hours later my budding friendship with ‘Chat’ had turned very dark and I was ready to give up…‘whose idea was it to go overland?!’ I hissed to his sleeping body…

I had navigated the booking part well enough but payment was proving impossible. I did everything ‘Chat’ told me to do. ‘Cancel everything and start again.’ Irritating because each time you have to input the details of each passenger, including full name, passport number, passport expiry date, date of birth, etc., but I did it.

Nope, still couldn’t pay.

‘Close the app.’ Turn off your phone.’‘Try using this link to our website.’ ‘Switch browser.’

…nothing worked and after two hours of this, ‘Chat’ sent one last message. ‘Only Russian credit card can be used to book train…’

‘But I told you I was British two hours ago?!’ …’and what about people from Kazakhstan going to Russia, how are they supposed to book tickets!?’

Chat’s only reply was to state again: ‘only Russian credit card can be used to book train…’

‘I am literally never speaking to you again’ I growled.

I lay there thinking of solutions (and I confess, mean ways to get back at ‘Chat’). What we needed was someone with a Russian credit card …and some way of paying that someone back.

I had managed to open a temporary bank account the last time I was in Russia could that work again? Might Olga, the woman Rosa and I shared a room with in Georgia for four days, be willing to help us…?!

Too early to text her.

To ease my frustration I looked on the train booking app for Laos again – yes it was open but there were almost no tickets available. Was this the same reason as in Thailand? …was everyone on the move to celebrate Songkran with family and friends? There was one train available in the whole three days, luckily it was the last train of the day, which at least meant we had plenty of time to get from Udon Thani in Thailand and across the border to the train station to the north of the Laos capital Vientiane.

I went downstairs for a while and talked to Natascha about the jigsaw puzzle that was our Russian visa application and she said Bob might be able to help us…we chatted a little about how much fun teaching the twins was and how the rhythm of learning to read each day had made a big difference to family life.

It was good to talk about normal daily life things and I went upstairs to wake Rosa and Theo in a better frame of mind.

While they woke up in their different gentle ways I did a bit more ‘Russia’ and booked our hotels in Astrakhan and Vladikavkaz …if we could just get those train tickets we would only need to complete our applications.

I wrote my ‘please will you pay for our train tickets on your credit card and trust that we will pay you back somehow at some point in the next five weeks’ text to our friend Olga and left it ready to send…let her have her first coffee of the day before she gets that!

…and then I went online to check my actual Russian visa application. We had all filled them in to a certain point whilst we were in Australia and had access to a computer.

Russian visa applications are six pages long, requiring all the normal details you’d expect and then adding in some interesting stuff including: your mother and father’s names, dates and places of birth, details of where and when they had died (if they had died). The application requires your previous passport numbers, including expiry dates – the names and addresses of the hotels you are staying in …and details of all the countries you’ve visited in the last two years, quite a list for us now.

It takes a good hour to complete the form from scratch and it’s easy to make a mistake. Our fail safe is to swap devices after we’ve finished and check each others – there are always little details we’ve missed or are different on each others forms and we’ve now got it down so that each form is exactly the same : )

I found my application number and popped it on their website – ‘no application with that number can be found’…I checked again, same result.

This day was not going well…

We needed to get the bus and train tickets, hotel bookings and our accompanying letter printed out while we were still with our cousins, and we needed to have our applications almost perfect ready to print when we got into China.

Time for calming words…’take deep breaths’, ‘you’ve got this’, ‘everything happens for a reason’…’it will all work out’

Theo’s application was miraculously still accessible but Rosa, like me, had to start again. Luckily we still had all the details because we had a copy of the form from when we went to the Russian embassy in Sydney (good call keeping that!)

We decided we would look at it all after lunch so that we could enjoy some of our last day with our family…it was time to send that text to Olga in Russia.

I tried not to keep looking at my phone, and Zachy and Leilah helped.  We had a railway track building session …it really was huge and we had great fun building villages next to the railway and choosing which trees to have next to our houses…and then we went out for a walk and a play by a canal, and to pick up Suitcase.

Suitcase was beautiful. An entirely new handle/bracing/bracketing wheel  unit had been put on, I could almost feel the ‘let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!’ eagerness coming from Suitcase…all in good time buddy!

After lunch we headed upstairs to ‘apply’ and a tedious fifty minutes later we were nearly there when a text came through from Olga…she was happy to help and we could ring her in half an hour!! Perfect…

We finished what we could of the visas – closing and opening them again just to be sure, and then rang Olga. It was lovely to hear her voice again and we worked out together that we would need to travel third class because of her credit limit. She would send me her credit card details to book the tickets because I had all the passenger info. She would also send her bank details to me so we could figure out a way to pay her back… If we couldn’t open a temporary bank account, or get the money back to her any other way, we would leave it in an envelope for her at the Hotel Vladikavkaz. A plan at least!

When does someone you have only met once before agree to do you that kind of favour? To trust you with their credit card details and a £100 of their money for at least two weeks, maybe five if we couldn’t get the money to her before we got to Russia…

It was utterly incredible.

We went straight on to the TuTu website and through the well worn process of trying to book the tickets, but this time when we got to payment we had a Russian credit card and it worked first time!!

Eureka!…all the things we needed for our Russian visa were now in place. We went online and figured out how to book appointments for the following week at the Russian embassy in Guangzhou.

They were only open for visa applications between 9.00 and 11.00 on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays… the timing was going to be tight.

It took two weeks to process our visas and we needed to leave that area in just over two weeks time from the day we arrived in China. We would literally arrive in Guilin one day and have to be in Guangzhou the next. We thought about going to Guangzhou first but we needed our passports to register with the police in Guilin. When we looked up train times we couldn’t get to our appointments in time. We’d have to get a taxi or hire a driver, how much was that going to cost?

I texted someone we knew at the Chinese Language Institute in Guilin to ask for help…

At least if we had a driver then it would be easy to travel back to Guilin from Guangzhou without our passports. Every train booking required you to have your passport to access the train, and the idea of living in China for two weeks without our passports was… well, something we’d have to deal with when we got there.

We finished our Russian applications as far as we could – where we had travelled in the last two years would have to be completed in China because the form didn’t allow future dates.

Were we crazy to be trying to apply for a Russian transit visa in China? Probably, but we’d come this far and this was the only Russian Embassy that had responded to me. I had written and rung Bangkok and Kazakhstan Embassy’s as well and heard nothing…

Two days before I had rung the Guangzhou visa hotline number to ask about how we could travel in China without our passports. The number wasn’t recognised so I’d rung the ‘in an emergency’ number, and after trying all the options and ending up at voice mail each time I pressed the ‘if you are in a life threatening situation’ option – the man who answered didn’t speak English so he passed me on to someone else. I had apologised and explained our situation and he uttered the ominous four words: ‘is that Shannon Coggins?’

What?? How did this man know my name…? Bob looked up from his book a question in his eyes – how does the Russian Embassy in Guangzhou know your name?

Under what circumstances is it good news when the random official in a Russian Embassy in a huge city in China knows your name?

There was only one explanation ‘…is that Igor?’

Across the three embassies I had had one response from my emails asking for help. A man named Igor had written giving another email address to write too, but they had never responded so I’d written to him again. He had responded again a little more tersely the second time but at least he had replied. 

Was it him…? If not…

… for a moment there I felt like I was in some glorious spy movie.

But if course it was Igor who was efficiently helpful and gave  us enough hope to carry on with our applications!

We couldn’t do more with our Russian visa’s now so I opened the Laos train website for some reason…I’m not sure what made me do it to be honest, some instinct buried deep.

The tickets I had bought were for the wrong day.

Somehow, I had bought tickets for today – for a train that was leaving in an hours time.

I would have sworn on my mother’s life AND death that I had bought tickets for the right day. I had known the date we needed to travel for over a week, I’d set an alarm on my phone to make sure I bought the tickets for the right day…

How had it happened?

I won’t ever know but it was clear I had made a mistake. I felt that gut churning shock I always feel, my face went red, I wanted to run away and hide.

I would so love to be someone who didn’t feel like that every time I made a mistake, and the truth was the tickets only cost £40 – I’d saved that amount of money so many times in the little things I’d figured out how to do; just sitting in the telecom office in Indonesia for three hours had saved us £60 in data charges…

But could I shake the feeling of being a total idiot and that this was a complete disaster? Sadly not…

I was due to talk to a dear friend who rang me at just the moment I was picking up the hair shirt, she let me cry a bit and then suggested we fly home, ‘why bother with all this stress, you made it one way!?’ She made me laugh and helped me soften a little towards myself…

After the call I picked myself up and went on the Laos train app to see what was possible.

Nothing.

There were no trains to Luang Prabang for six days and we were leaving tomorrow…and no trains for our onward journey to China either.

How was that even possible?

Theoretically the onward tickets weren’t bookable until tomorrow but I could see the ‘sold out’ icon next to every single train for seven days. Clearly the ‘you can only book three days in advance’ info was rubbish…these tickets were booked up for well over a week!

Rosa and Theo came back in and we tried everything we could think of. All-through trains from Laos to China, splitting the journey in different ways and on different days, and eventually we turned to another booking website, maybe they’d bought up all the tickets?!

I filled out all the details and just as I hit send, spending £220 of the money we had left I noticed I had put ‘gmsil’ instead of ‘gmail’ on the email address where the tickets needed to be sent too…

I was NOT having a good day.

Rosa and I looked through their returns policy and it was clear this happened all the time and it would be fine (it did not feel fine). There was no guarantee they’d be able to get the tickets for us anyway but I sent a message in to their contact address with the booking reference and had a very reassuring reply to my correct email address within ten minutes…

We still didn’t have any tickets but we weren’t going to lose our money if they couldn’t get them for us.

Time to do something else.

Cousin Bob had wanted to take me to have a blessing for our journey at the local Buddhist Temple…

Yep we definitely needed that.

It was good to get out of the ‘failure’ feelings and the ‘OMG how are we going to get to China, we’ve got a Russian visa appt in six days time’ feelings.

It was a beautiful temple and after a search about we found one monk, watering the plants. I loved that the  monk we found was doing the watering…

Bob asked him if he could do a travel blessing and he nodded and took us into a temple room. Bob and I removed our shoes and the monk and I sat opposite each other.

He sat calmly looking steadily at me for a while and then casually pulled his cell phone out from inside his robes and used iTranslate to share his wisdom with me. The modern age eh?

He told me I’d been having a hard time recently – (!) – he told me to stop thinking too much about things (!) …he told me to remember his face and that when I felt scared to think of him. He was very definite about this last point and looked at me for a while before he put a red thread bracelet on my wrist and cut the ends, very close to the knot… I’d need to watch that.

He had a real strength about him that monk, and he got through to me with the feeling scared bit. I have thought about him a few times since and what I’ve noticed is a sense that we are not on our own with all this…the bracelet he gave me had three red threads, one for each of us.

Bob gave a donation to the Temple and we were on our way home…‘thank you so much cuz!’ …I didn’t get a sense that the monk could fix my relationship with ‘Chat’ or get me a train ticket to Laos, but underneath I felt a little more settled.

When we got back in I checked my emails and saw the other company had not been able to get us any tickets to Luang Prabang either so our £220 would come back…I would rather have had the tickets but it was  better than no tickets and no money.

Next we looked back on the Laos train booking app and miraculously there were three first class seats available the day after we had wanted to leave Luang Prabang. It would be no hardship to stay there another night, but could we do it? We would have to rearrange our Russian visa appointments, navigating their two stage booking system and cancelling our previous appointments. We would have to go there two days later and timing was tight already? We would also need to change the date of our train tickets in China…we looked at the dates all of it was possible.

We booked first class.

It turned out to cost the same as booking second class via the other company, £70 each for a ten hour journey from Luang Prabang to Kunming in China. We briefly wondered what first class on a Chinese/Laos bullet train would be like, but then had to get on with amending our visa appt times with the Russian consulate and emailing our Chinese train ticket agent.

Some days are mental – and today it was truer than it had ever been – I was holding so much in my mind, and it was full on. We still needed to get all our documents printed out, we still needed to pack … and we wanted to spend some time with our family!!

We are good at packing nowadays so that took no time at all. The email and embassy stuff we split between us and was all done in half an hour…we emailed everything that needed printing to Natascha and Bob.

Time to let it all go.

We wanted to have a birthday celebration with Bob. It had been his birthday while we’d been away and we’d talked to Natascha about a present for him and agreed  we would pay for him and the family to go out for a meal, but the air quality hadn’t allowed that. The air quality was still rubbish so Bob suggested we got a take away from a fabulous local restaurant and that worked for all of us.

Natascha had a horrible headache (sounded like a Thai massage related injury to me…she’d had a massage the night before and her lady had not been gentle at all…) – I started to rub some massage stuff into her neck and shoulder and she asked me about our onward journey.

We were leaving at 5.30 and had train tickets to the border of Thailand, the first one a thirteen hour journey in third class with the heat predicted to reach 38 degrees. We then had a three hour wait on a station platform followed by an eight and a half hour journey in a ‘second class sleeper seat’ – there had been no beds available and it sounded a little better that third class…we would see.

After we reached Udon Thani, near the border of Laos, we had no tickets booked until we reached Luang Prabang, some 250 miles away, only slightly less than the distance from Bristol to the Lake District.

This was the first time we’d be heading off knowing we couldn’t get where we needed to get to without a miracle – any chance little bracelet?

…and then the bracelet fell off.

I didn’t decide the bracket falling off was an omen, I had known it was going to fall off. I decided it was an opportunity to take something else with us…I found some of the leftover thread Zachy had been using to make webs and cages and fixed the bracelet, the bright green and blue clashing fabulously with the red : )

Saying goodbye to Zachy and Leilah was sweet, like nearly everything we’d done, coming back here again so soon after the first time had given us a chance to build on our connection. We knew each other a bit better, and the love was right there; in their hands touching ours, in the brave knocks on our doors to come and play – in the little pictures we drew each other…and in the messages we have sent each other since we left ♥️🧡💛

It took a while before Natascha came downstairs to eat, but it was a good night. The food was delicious and Bob came up with a genius solution for paying Olga back – if that came off it world be so easy!

Theo and Natascha talked about important stuff while Bob and I did the printing, and I got Bob to show me in more detail where Nancy had lived in Guangzhou…I couldn’t believe that our Russian visa application was taking us to the place where she had been born, and where the Chinese part of our family still lived now. It was a precious coincidence.

…and then it was time for bed, tomorrow was going to be a long day.

It had been brief but so so lovely to spend time together, the studio a highlight for all of us, big hugs all round and I tried to make them promise not to get up in the morning to see us off…

The first thing I did when I woke up was check the Laos train booking app, I’d forgotten that it didn’t open until 6.30 so I slipped downstairs and put the kettle on. I looked out of the window and saw our taxi sitting outside already, that was reassuring.

Both Bob and Natascha did get up to say goodbye despite their promises, and we left laden with delicious fruit and snacks for the journey. A last look in each other’s eyes, and we were off…a deeper love between us.

The first 13 hours in third class were hot and long but we had bums made of iron now. We all have our strategies for coping with the wind blast factor from the windows, the dust, the heat and the noise of the train.

We were sat together which helped with the leg room and the seats were slightly more comfortable than the train to Cambodia had been at least.

I loved the view out of the window – when was I going to see nature like this again? …time to make the most of the birds and the beauty.

We arrived at Ayutthaya station late but the cafe we had been relying on for dinner was still open for fifteen minutes of air conditioned bliss. They made us a takeaway of fried rice and we all had something delicious to drink.

I spent the next two hours on the platform walking up and down, Theo found an interesting Thai person to talk to and Rosa stood outside the cafe because they kept their WiFi on. The time passed quickly.

Our second class seats in the next train were padded and the back went back a little which was better than being sat up all night, but it was definitely not a bed!

The lights were bright and the train stopped, a lot. Each time it stopped the tannoy system shouted important information to us all about where we were, and then we’d leave and it would shout again – presumably about where we’d left…loud and irritatingly repetitive, I could feel my love of train travel slowly eroding as the night wore on…stupid tannoy systems, loud whistles, clanging bells and shouting passengers…I started muttering, never a good sign, and then I remembered.

…we had a little something prepared for just such an eventuality. Bob had bought the ingredients from a high street store to make medicinal chocolate balls that he was quite convinced would help us sleep, they were delicious and they actually worked.

We weren’t in terrible shape when we arrived in Udon Thani at 7.00 the next morning, we were tired but okay…each of us had slept a little. We knew the way to the bus station from last time and headed straight there.

On the first long train we’d come up with a plan for trying to get to Luang Prabang – get the bus across the border straight to Vientiane, and then go to the Northern bus station. Rosa had found out that there were loads of buses every day. They took nine hours because the roads were terrible, but it was probably a better bet than going to the train station and hoping we’d get a ticket.

Theo spotted the Vientiane sign and we dumped our bags down. We needed to get tickets so I headed inside the terminal.

The man sat behind the counter looked bored. I asked for three tickets to Vientiane and he asked to see our Laos visas (which we had printed out!) – he pointed to a sign on the window, ‘eVisa, no bus!’ When I asked ‘why?’ boredom quickly turned to irritation and he jabbed at the sign again and turned away from me dismissively. I had read something about not being able to get on a bus if you were applying for a visa at the border, so  we had made sure we had eVisa’s – I stood there for a bit not really understanding and contemplating making a scene but I suspected that wasn’t going to change his mind, anyone who’s gone to the effort to make a sign and stick it up was pretty committed to their position, so I contented myself with giving his back my best ‘look’ and headed outside.

How were we going to get to the border now?

I walked over to a woman sitting at a small ticket booth and said, in my best Thai accent, ‘ชายแดน’ (‘border’ for those of you unfamiliar with the Thai language : ). She pointed at a minibus over the road, that would have to do.

I went to get Theo and Rosa.

One of the things I forget to do when I know something Theo and Rosa don’t is to be patient and let them ask any questions they might have. I have already processed all the new info and just want to ‘get on’ so I explain what’s happened and then start moving… expecting to be followed.

Rosa stood there and asked, really reasonably, ‘why won’t they let us on the bus?’ Like most of us she was trying to understand something that made no sense, but I got irritated…I’d have told them why if I’d known why and it was slowing us down, but the truth was I did have a hunch why and it would have been really helpful to share it. Instead I said ‘I have no more clue why they won’t let us on the bus than you do, I just want you to trust me when I say we can’t – let’s go…’ and walked off a bit huffily…

When we got to the minibus stand I noticed I was being unreasonable and explained my hunch…

I suspect I will have another opportunity to practice my ‘things aren’t going quite according to plan’ communication skills at some other point on the way home…

The minibus wanted £2.50 each to take us to the border, a taxi was only £11 …and we would get there an hour sooner. Time was important if we were going to get a bus to Luang Prabang and we had a lot of luggage so I went in search of an ATM to pay for the cab.

On the way back I saw a blind man selling tiny things on a tray, I bought a bright yellow rubber duck on a key ring and stuffed it in my bag (maybe it was a magic rubber duck keyring…)

I ordered our last ever GRAB and we headed to the border. Our taxi driver was lovely and it was cool in his cab – we all needed a bit of this.

Forty miles of the journey done our driver drove us as close to the border as he could and luckily we chose the right queue for leaving Thailand – one moved about three people in the entire half hour it took us to get through (thank you to the patron saint of queuing!)

As we left the building we followed everyone else and bought tickets for a bus to take us across the Friendship Bridge and away from Thailand.

We had nearly made it to Laos – the processing of our eVisa was surprisingly quick and we were in. We needed cash to be able to go any further so I went in search of an ATM but the only one I could find didn’t look like any I’d seen before so I went for back up, I wasn’t doing this on my own!

A helpful man in a uniform confirmed it was definitely an ATM so Rosa and I went back and stood in the booth.

I put the card in and nothing happened – no whirring noises, no changes on the screen, nothing.

We stared hard at the screen…willing the thing to do something, anything!

…and then it sprang into life, asked for my pin in English, whirred around a bit, clunked a couple of times and gave us some money AND my card back.

Where to now?! …probably towards that big green bus.

As we dragged Suitcase across the rapidly warming tarmac the bus set off. There wouldn’t have been room for us anyway, it was crazy full so we sat at the bus stop and waited for tuk-tuk drivers to approach us.

We had the safety net of the next bus coming along at some point so they had a little bidding war between them which resulted in us paying a reasonable price to get all the way to the Northern bus station.

We were on our way quickly, our sleep deprived and very flexible little family was actually doing quite well. We had been aiming to get to the Northern bus station by 11.00/11.30 to give ourselves the best chance of catching one of the buses to Luang Prabang and we were going to get there at 11.15.

We thanked our tuk-tuk driver and headed in. Theo found the Luang Prabang counter and we rushed over to join the queue.

Pretty quickly we could see something wasn’t right – people kept melting away and the ticket man kept shaking his head. The Swiss guy ahead of us heard what we’d already guessed, ‘there were no tickets left for Luang Prabang today’.

Perhaps it was lucky we hadn’t really slept, of all the things that could have gone wrong it had never occurred to us that there wouldn’t be a bus…

We stood there and looked at the seats at the back of the bus station…maybe we could just lie down and sleep? It was tempting but we’d done so well to get here in the middle of the day…did we really want to give up now?

We did nothing for a few minutes and then one of us said ‘how much is a taxi?’

I looked it up, about £250…bloody hell!

Rosa remembered the website she’d  found had said there might be other unscheduled minibuses outside the station so we left Theo with all the luggage and the two of us headed outside.

We wandered about for a bit but we couldn’t understand any of the signs, and then we saw a couple of minibuses up the far end. There was a small booth selling tickets to a town called Vang Vieng. We looked it up and it turned out to be nearly half way to Luang Prabang …surely it would be easier to get a bus from there? …and Vang Vieng was on the main train line too.

We went and shared the news with Theo and we all thought it was better to keep moving than sitting here, so we paid the £4 each for our tickets. We were too late for the first bus but there was another within minutes and being first in line meant we could sit behind the driver, without doubt the best seats in a bus absolutely crammed with people, luggage and very large bags of vegetables.

The journey was much quicker than my app said it would be, three and a half hours shrank down to two …it looked like they had built a new part of road quite recently.

Vang Vieng was in a stunning valley surrounded by mountains covered in lush green jungle and from inside the air conditioned minibus it looked like a lovely place to stay.

As soon as we hit the pavement and the waves of intense heat washed over us we stopped feeling quite so romantic. None of us could contemplate the effort to book a place to stay and to sustain the hope that we’d find a way to Luang Prabang tomorrow – we wanted to get there today!

There were a few guys at the bus stop but no minibuses. We asked the question but we knew the answer already – there were no buses of any kind to Luang Prabang today and the only tuk-tuk driver prepared to take us wanted 6,000,000 Kip. About £220. It was like trying to find a Christmas present at 4.30 pm on Christmas Eve. The country had shut down and the people were off to celebrate.

We had reached the end of the road.

We looked at each other, seeing the tiredness we felt reflected in each others faces. We only had one idea left in us. Go and look at the bus station and if there were no buses there, go to the train station and hope.

The bus station was about a ten minute walk but we were in no fit state to carry all our luggage anywhere in the near 40 degree heat. A sweet man offered to take us for a fair price and he drove slowly past the bus station so we could see for ourselves what we had already been told. There were no buses there at all.

That journey to the train station provided us with a good reality check as well. We bounced about all over the place and to get to Luang Prabang we knew we would be travelling on roads that were likely to be way worse than this… Six hours in the back of a tuk-tuk. Really? …crazy to contemplate in this intense heat – it was (almost) unthinkable.

Bracelet, Ducky…Suitcase? Any chance you are magical objects with actual magical powers…??

The station was a thing of beauty and we suspected it was much larger than it needed to be. It was spotlessly clean with smooth tiled floors and high arching ceilings…it was wonderfully cool but our secret wish that we might be able to find a corner to curl up and sleep in until we could get a ticket for a train was clearly not going to be possible, the ticket checking desk was just inside the front door. Without a ticket that was as far as we were going to get…

I showed the two people sitting at that desk the tickets I had bought for the wrong day and they got someone to help us try and get a refund. We knew that wasn’t possible, the train had gone already, but when I explained the mistake I had made it did elicit some sympathy from the lovely two people sat there.

The young woman suggested we keep checking the train app, sometimes returns came back in at the last minute…

Our hopes raised we sat on the floor and repeatedly opened and closed the app. There was only one train left going to Luang Prabang today and it left in two and a half hours time.

After a while the same lovely woman suggested we went to the ticket office in the next building, just in case.

That woman was not so lovely. ‘No, there were not any tickets available and no there would not be any returns coming back at this late stage.’

I trudged back to Theo and Rosa, not in a rush to give them the news…and as I sat down I opened the app again. I couldn’t believe it, next to the ‘book now’ sign it said ‘few first class tickets available’!!

Was this it?

If you are like me you would be forgiven for thinking ‘few’ means, well. ‘a few’, turns out what it actually means is anything more than none.

There was one first class ticket. THAT IS NOT ‘A FEW’…we slumped back down and after a while I got up and went outside and over to the row of tuk-tuk drivers. I did it as much to pass the time and have the enjoyment of going back into the air conditioned building as to find out any information.

They were engrossed in a game of cards but one driver looked up long enough to offer to take us to Luang Prabang for 4,000,000 Kip, well it was cheaper, but spending £150 on a bone jarring six hour heat fest…was that really our only way of getting to Luang Prabang tonight?!

If we were going to  we needed to leave soon, we really didn’t want to do that journey in the dark.

I got back in to the station and that one first class ticket was still available, taunting us.

We couldn’t bring ourselves to choose the tuk-tuk.

We couldn’t bring ourselves to book a hotel in Vang Vieng, and what was the point anyway…there were no trains to Luang Prabang the next day either.

We were stuck.

We’d come to the end of the rope and were hanging over the crocodiles. Us and Penelope Pitstop.

We said nothing.

We did nothing…there was nothing to do.

We needed to make a decision but we didn’t know how…

Eventually one of us suggested we try one last time to see if the ticket office could see that first class ticket. Theo and I went together – it wasn’t showing up on their system. No tickets were.

Even though the woman found us a little irritating she did check a couple of times, after a couple of minutes she looked up and said with utter finality – ‘There are no tickets, it isn’t possible to travel on this train…’

And then, as we turned away, a message came through on her walkie talkie…we needed to go back into the station.

We rushed out and Rosa was coming towards us, hope shining in her face, our lovely train ticket checking lady had been looking on her app every few minutes and had seen there were three second class tickets available.

My fingers fumbled to cancel the first class ticket which was still in my basket… and then there they were, we could see the tickets!!

We clicked on them and went through the tortuous payment process which required Rosa to look up details of a card I’d left at home but we’d got photos of on her phone and mine ‘just in case’. It felt like it took us hours to book those tickets, but in reality in less than five minutes it was done.

We were going on the last train, from the last stop, with the last tickets on sale that day.

We all cried.

Thank you Duck, Monk and Suitcase…one of you pulled this off!!

After we’d let a few tears fall we thanked our lovely caring ticket angel with all our hearts. She scanned our e-tickets and we headed through to the baggage checking in process.

I don’t know why what happened next got to me so much, maybe I’d finally let go of the mistake I’d made and the tension we’d been under for the last few days, but I lost it.

The customs woman took my hair cutting scissors off me.

Such a small thing after all we’d been through, but those scissors had come through every train X-ray security check, every ferry check and every bus check …all the way to Australia and back. They had passed every size test in China and Laos on the way out …and I had cut Theo’s hair with them for ten years.

It wasn’t fair and it didn’t make sense.

I did not go down without a fight, I tried to explain that they were the woman the legal length, that every other security team had allowed them in Laos and China, but the slightly cocky, slightly arrogant security woman told me I could ‘go outside and catch a bus, or leave the scissors.’

I left the scissors.

If our Suitcase had teeth I’d have set it on her…

I sat in a heap for a while and then Rosa came over and pointed out that sometimes for a miracle to happen we have to give something up.

I could almost feel that – hadn’t it been me who’d wondered if the universe fairies were taking my charging cable and marmite for their own ends?!

…and if someone had come to me and said, ‘look I can get you three tickets on that last train but I’ll need something in return!’ I’d have said, ‘what do you want? Literally ask for anything!’ ‘I want your scissors’ …’no problem take them with my thanks!’

Much easier if the exchange is understandable – much less so if it’s unfair and doesn’t make sense.

‘Go on, get her Suitcase…’

I bought some chocolate and a smoothie.

The train arrived and we left Vang Vieng behind.

There were more than a few spaces on the train which was a bit bloody irritating but within an hour we were pulling into the station, we thought about where we would be on the road if we had taken the tuk-tuk…still with four hours to go and £130 poorer, the train tickets had only cost £20.

We looked out and saw the numbers of people streaming off the train, that was a lot of people – New Year was clearly a big deal in Laos.

We were here, Luang Prabang, our tired hearts lifted a little and we headed outside. We found a tuk-tuk to take us the ten miles into town and the closer we got to our guesthouse the more obvious it was what the celebration of Songkran involved. New Year was a massive three day water fight and a lot of people wanted to do it in Luang Prabang!

We got soaked on that journey – every tuk-tuk, every motorbike, every pedestrian got soaked. There were people lining the streets with hoses and buckets and huge water pistols – and each soaking was done with a smile and a wave.

…each drop of water, was a blessing : )

We have no way of knowing if those three days will end up being the worst of our trip. What we can say though is that they were really tough and we were saved by the piece of luck that came along right at the end.

We are so grateful for that moment – that most unlikely of chances coming our way and to whoever or whatever we owe our gratitude, thank you!