DAY EIGHTEEN - the one where I go to Laos
I got a tuktuk at 6.30am to the border. The crossings were quick and easy through the respective immigrations on either side of the Friendship Bridge which spans the Mekong River.
The Laos visa-on-arrival costs US$30 (for most nationalities), plus a US$1 "fee", plus an extra US$2 because I didn't have any passport photos. Technically you need to provide two passport photos along with the visa form but I knew that they would waive this for a couple of dollars so I didn't bother bringing any. There's not even any need for an "oh no I forgot the photos" because they don't care at all. In fact they probably prefer it because they get to pocket the extra money. I had specifically brought US$35 in cash with me for this visa and made sure that the three US$10 notes were pristine because it is generally the case that American notes get rejected over the tiniest rip or smudge. I hadn't been as careful in my choice of the $1 notes for the simple reason that the bank only had five of them to give so I just took them as they were. The border guard rejected three of those five $1 notes, and I had to pay that amount in Baht.
When I got off the free Thai shuttle bus which runs across the bridge between the two immigration points, I had been immediately intercepted by one of the touts who lurk here to nab unsuspecting tourists. He had a bus to the capital city Vientiane. An actual bus? Yes yes, an actual bus. I played his game, letting him get me the visa forms and all that sort of thing. Saved me standing in the queue. When I got through Customs (such as they were) he said his bus was just over here. It was, of course, a car. I can't remember the price he quoted for the ride to Vientiane because the Laotian money (called Kip) has more zeros than I have fingers, but needless to say it was somewhere in the region of "take a hike buddy".
I left him to try and take advantage of another tourist and found an ATM. It wouldn't let me take out 1.5 million Kip because it was "over my daily limit" (?), so had to settle for only one million.
I knew there was a bus to the city but not where to catch it and nobody was offering any answer, so I took a songthaew for 200 Baht (which was probably ten times the real price but I had no scale to judge by yet). A songthaew, for those of you who aren't familiar with Thai transport, is basically a small truck which operates as a taxi; in the back there is a bench along each side for the passengers, cargo goes in the centre of the aisle, and if need be there are also railings for people to hang off the back. The ride took about an hour - it's just over twenty kilometres.
It took another hour to find a hotel. I hadn't expected this to be difficult, and I certainly hadn't expected the prices the hotels were charging! I settled on the New Hotel where a room was 120,000 Kip, or about NZ$20. This was the cheapest place I could find.
I really liked the little that I saw of Vientiane. I'm not a city person at all. If I'm going to be exhausted and sweaty I'd much rather it was in the middle of the jungle somewhere and not surrounded by buildings, but there are some cities in southeast Asia which I just like. Vientiane reminded me much more of Vietnam than Thailand. They even have the little shops and stalls everywhere selling what in Vietnam is called Banh Mi (think a baguette filled with salad and meat, but in Laos called Khao Jee Pate). If I'd been on a long trip I might have found myself hanging out in Vientiane for a few more days.
I wasn't sure if I'd be coming back through Vientiane later in the trip (there is another border crossing further to the east, which I was contemplating taking on the return to Thailand), so today I aimed to get out to the Lao Zoo. Although it is "in Vientiane" it really isn't, being instead about 65km north of the city, on the route to Ban Keun. It is quite easily reached by bus but it takes a fair while to get out there and back, so I don't know how accessible it is in real terms for the locals.
It was about 10am before I could set off for the Lao Zoo, still a surprisingly early start given that I had begun the day in Thailand. Pre-trip information-gathering had said that I should take a bus from the Morning Market (next to the city bus station) but when I got there I was told that I had to go to the Southern Bus Terminal to catch a Ban Keun bus. This is also what the receptionist at my hotel had told me, but the city bus station was closer so I'd figured it would make sense to try there first. It cost me 30,000 Kip for a songthaew ride to the other bus station (double the real price, as I found out later), and then I got a shared-taxi on the Ban Keun route for 25,000 Kip to the zoo, arriving there at 12.30pm.
The Lao Zoo is a very chaotic sort of zoo, although that isn't necessarily a
bad thing. I initially started keeping notes with the view of writing a walk-through review of the zoo, but quickly abandoned that idea as the grounds were such a mish-mash of old cages, really good new enclosures (notably for bears and macaques), empty cages, unsigned but still-inhabited cages, signed but apparently-uninhabited cages, occasionally animals in cages signed for other species. There is no apparent pattern to the layout at all, just cages spread everywhere. Even places which looked long-abandoned or off-limits turned out to have inhabited cages, even to the extent of having new signage in some cases. I almost missed the Hog Badger because it was in one of these "abandoned" areas which appeared to have no actual access path - and yet the enclosure itself had new signage on it when I reached it. There is also no map for the zoo, neither in paper form nor signboard form, so I just took every path which wasn't marked "staff only" and hoped I saw everything. Even so, I suspect I probably did miss animals.
The zoo mostly functions as a rescue centre nowadays, and only the animals which cannot be released again remain at the zoo after treatment. There is a smattering of the old exotics left, but otherwise the inhabitants are local animals. With the notable exceptions of the macaques where there were easily fifty-plus animals, and probably the bears (of which I saw none but for which there are a great many enclosures), most of the species are represented by only one or a few individuals.
I wrote out a species list and general impression here (and of course there are a lot of photos in the gallery):
Lao Zoo species lists, October 2019 [Lao Zoo]
I spent about two hours there. It's not a bad zoo, nor is it really a good zoo. It has elements of both. The only species of particular interest to me were a Hog Badger and a Common Otter (presumably of the local subspecies) - I had been hoping for some much rarer species due to both the location of the zoo and the fact that it takes in a lot of rescued or confiscated animals. I would recommend visiting if in the area, but it is a long trip - from the Southern Bus Station to the zoo is about two hours (and between the Southern Bus Station and the City Bus Station in the centre of Vientiane, which will probably be your starting point, is another hour). I spent two hours at the zoo, versus five-and-a-half hours on buses getting there and back. Whether that is a good ratio of zoo to travel might be debatable.
I had a preconception that I would not see many wild animals in Laos. The impression I had gained from trip reports was that the country had been stripped even cleaner than Vietnam. By the end of the first day my Laotian bird list was only five species long. There weren't even a lot of individual birds either, one or two here and there, and a few little flocks of sparrows. I didn't know how or if things would be different once I left the vicinity of Vientiane.
Animals seen today:
BIRDS:
(Thailand)
Zebra Dove
Geopelia striata
Tree Sparrow
Passer montanus
Feral Pigeon
Columba livia
Common Mynah
Acridotheres tristis
White-vented Mynah
Acridotheres grandis
(Laos)
House Sparrow
Passer domesticus
Cattle Egret
Bubulcus ibis
Brown Shrike
Lanius cristatus
Common Tailorbird
Orthotomus sutorius
Spotted Dove
Streptopelia chinensis
MAMMALS:
None - as would remain the case for the next few days...
