NongKai

Oct 23

Me and Sarah had to go to Laos this week to get our non immigrant visas. Nongkai is the border town in Thailand, and in the town there is a bridge that crosses over to Laos. Everyone told me that Nongkai was a really cool city so I was kind of excited to go and see it. Plus I was supposed to go to the market there and pick up some things for people. Turns out though that I didn’t see much of Nongkai at all.
We took a bus that went all night long Wed. night and stopped in Nongkai finally 5:30 am (10 hr bus ride). As soon as we landed at Tuk Tuk driver was holding my arm and asking me where I was going. I expected this kind of welcome though since we were the only white people on the bus. It’s never a bad experience, just different than what any other Thai person would experience. He told me he’d take me across the bridge to Lao for 2.5 dollars. I knew the bridge wasn’t open yet, and when I said 1.75 dollars he accepted right away. Even in my state of just waking up I knew I probably wasn’t getting much of a deal here. All of a sudden we were brought to some kind of a shed outside where this lady told us she’d get all our paperwork done for $45. I didn’t know what kind of a deal this was, but there wasn’t too many other options and I didn’t feel like we would be ripped off to bad. So, we handed over our passports, she made us some coffee and I got to see a nice sunrise. After it was done we were taken by the tuk tuk across the bridge with another woman from the Philippines who was in the same situation we were in. Then we were in Laos and found out we had to spend the night. The next day we picked up our passports from embassy and rode a bus back to Thailand. As soon as we got back to Nongkai we were hurried onto another bus where we spent another 10 hours going home.
It turns out that it was a great thing that the tuk tuk driver took us to that lady, otherwise we wouldn’t have had all our paperwork and would’ve had to run all over the place and spent another day out there trying to get it! I felt so out of control during that whole experience, but I also was able to trust that it would all work out somehow in the end. Nongkai probably is a beautiful city, too bad I didn’t get to see it!