Visa Runs, Laos & Patience

Typical scene in Laos

What was meant to be a quick and easy visa run turned out to be an adventure. Not as glorious as Indiana Jones and the Temple of doom - I'm yet to walk into any temple and find this 'doom', and unlike Indiana, I'm not bush-whacking through jungles, nonetheless, I found myself using my God-given power of patience.

It started Thursday night, when I was expected to be at the designated pickup point for a 7pm departure. I was booked and traveling with an 'Agent Tour' the 9 hours to Laos. The idea is, the agent is the middleman who makes it easy to get my returning Thai visa. Makes perfect sense and the tour is packaged to include hotel, food, visa (sorting out the messy fine print) and travel, returning within a few days with a new shinny holographic visa pasted into my passport. Easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy.

So being a typical westerner with a slightly organised and task orientated personality I arrive 20 min early. At this point my patience button is fine, as we all know that it really doesn't start working till 10min before an event is supposed to happen. But you can begin to feel it warm up.

No sign of the van. 

Start talking to self in mind. Mentally going over the instructions - yup, in right place. Calm self down with extra reassurance in checking my written instructions also and reminding self that they still have a 10 minute window. Button explosion aborted - phew!

7pm - Still no van. Patience drains from me! leaving me trying to reason with self again. "It's a busy night, there is always delays." I internally implore. Appeasing her a little more, we give it another 10 minutes. I'm all eagle-eyed now at every vehicle that enters the parking lot and even follow one promising looking van round as written on the back window was 'TOUR'. But he pulled into an auto shop - so much for that, I return to my perch.

The phone number I have on me for the driver didn't work. Obviously a miscommunication between it being recited and being written down with only a verbal check. Time to call the boss - my earthly one. Aware of my expectations I ask if I need to be concerned or give it more time (this could be a culture thing). He reassures me that time will reveal all and tells me they're praying for me (our friends have meet to eat dinner - that I'm missing waiting for this van!).

I realise I hadn't given prayer my greatest attention. So in doing so now a calm relaxed state came over me and I was in the space to just chill and enjoy the evening. It was OK to wait - for all of 5 minutes, then self started ranting between the ears "does this company not care about it's business?!" 

Praying again. Calmness again. New thoughts started entering my mind. "This time in 24 hours this will be in the past." "You'll look back and laugh about this, it'll be over soon". 

I started feeling as if the whole situation was taken care of and I sort of felt like a kid again waiting for my parents to get us where we're going, trusting them, yet asking 'are we there yet?' a few times during the process.

This went on for an hour. But now I was relaxed and not pent up with anxiousness. I call the boss again, "Um, I'm still here - I think there is a problem" I state. This time he's rather perplexed to know what to do. But one of the dinner party told him what was happening as she'd previously been on the same tour. In short, I was given the wrong time to meet, in fact I was 24hrs late!

My Lao visa and Kip

Now perplexed, mildly dumb-founded and amused two boys from the mission compound popped down and helped me nut out what the next strategy would be. I was very grateful for their help as one had made the trip himself and the other was so laid back in personality it became a fun adventure that he wanted to come on to, had it not been for work the next day he would have, just for the fun of it. Our negotiations took a further hour and the new plans had me away for a further few days.

Ready to go, the boys thought they'd travel across town with me to the bus station, to see me off and because we were having so much fun laughing about the absurdity of the situation. I'm so pleased they did, as just when we were talking about the time of night we were at and the likelihood of the availability of a bus at 10pm - the unthinkable happened - our taxi broke down on the motorway overpass! Murphy's law came to mind as we paid the driver, got out and legged it while laughing along the median strip for half a kilometer until another taxi pulled over with a kind-hearted passenger and took us the rest of the way.

Finally seated and the boys fare-welled my bus left the terminal at 12:20am. I was the only farang on the bus and apart of being stared at and touched a couple of times through the night (lady behind me seemed fascinated with my pretty face - her words, in Thai) all went well. The rest of the trip went without hitch, though 12 hours long and a bus transfer somewhere in the middle of nowhere in the wee hours. And best yet, the silly opposing antics stopped once I got to the boarder.

So here I was, less than 24 hours later chuckling to myself and thanking God that my first real Thai adventure (the hard parts at least) were behind me. The rest of the trip with the hotel getting, food buying, visa application all went smoothly with a great few days biking round the sleepy rustic town of Vientiane.

Check out my images and impressions of Lao