Thai Visa Runs: Vientiane, Laos.

In order to be eligible for a twelve-months’ visa in Thailand, you have to have a certain amount of money in the bank: 400,000 Baht if you are married to a Thai and 800,000 if you are not married. (I have heard many times that two can live as cheaply as one, but never for half the price). Another condition is that that money has to be in a Thai bank three months before you need the visa.

This time my bank in Britain was slow sending my money to Thailand so I lost my year’s visa. There are a couple of alternatives open in this case but all need travel. My wife and I decided to go to the nearby Laotian capital of Vientiane, which is about 500 miles (800 kilometres) from where we live in northern Thailand, because neither of us had been there before.

The bus goes from Phitsanulok, which is about 75 kilometres in precisely the opposite direction from Laos, that is south-east. Since the bus was leaving at 22:00 there was no suitable bus to take us there and we had to book a taxi.

The journey to Phitsanulok took us four hours, because the taxi driver wanted to stop off and make sure that his mother was well. He was not a real taxi driver, merely a farmer with a car. There are no real taxis where I live and his mother was not sick, he just wanted to take advantage of the fact that he was going to be passing nearby her village to check that she was all right.

None of that is unusual here, you take it in your stride as part of travelling through ‘the country’. The bus was clean and comfortable and on time, which, to be fair, they often are. When it came to saying good-bye, why wife’s daughter did not want to get left behind. Luckily, there was a chair left on the bus, so we took her along too.

The journey to Udon Thani was enjoyable but long; seven hours of winding through the mountains of north-eastern Thailand, but in the dark so you could not see anything. Udon was cold – the first time I have ever been cold in Thailand in six years.

Although it was probably around ten degrees Celsius, I have become acclimatised to a minimum of 20c and an average of 30c. We had no warm clothes and the daughter did not have a change of clothes at all. Nor a passport. And she had forgotten her ID, which has to be carried at all times.

My wife rang a friend in Udon and she arranged a taxi to Vientiane, which is 22 kilometres across the border from Nong Khai, which is 50 kilometres north of Udon – a distance of 72 kilometres. This time it was a shop-keeper with a car who wanted to go to Laos to buy some duty-free cigarettes.

Once across ‘The Friendship Bridge’, we parted company for a time because I had to use a different path through passport control. My wife and her daughter were waiting at the other end for me, but the taxi had forsaken us and gone home. I have no concept how the daughter got through without an ID, but I know money changed hands. Getting a taxi, a real one, from there to Vientiane was easy.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on several topics, but is now concerned with Vientiane visa run. If you would like to know more, please visit our web site at Package Holidays to Thailand.