Reading our heading of this post you might make Laos out to be a complete PARADISE. Right?
My boyfriend and I recently went to Laos, Vientiane to sort out our Visa for Thailand, and it was possibly thee worst trip we've ever been on. Full of waiting in queues of frustration in 30 degree humidity and possibly inhaling an entire dump truck within the period of 2 hours.
Back then we had the high hopes of the unexpected expense of the visa on arrival fee being our only one in this trip...We were VERY wrong. We didn't expect the country to be so expensive.
Stunning monument lit up. Lots of admiration for the architecture. Laos is full of monuments, shrines, temples and fascinating buildings built with a ton of effort and precision.
FREE MONEY!!!
As usual you are expected to wait in yet another queue for a taxi from the airport, and to our surprise we actually ended up sharing a taxi (both parties paying full amount for one trip) Yes, that's right, our first rip off in Laos (we soon got VERY use to getting ripped off). We ended up sharing with a French man - who praised Laos to be this "paradise" and claimed it was full of beauty - he wasn't wrong on that end. Laos is without a doubt full of beauty - you just have to be adventurous and go out and find it.
We arrived at the hotel and tried some authentic foods.
STEEMIT LOGO ATTEMPT WITH FOOD.
And shorty after we decided to take a trip to the night market.
Aerobics by a lake...If only more Westerners had this in their lives. Think about how much peace of mind and less psychos there would be in the world.
Knowing absolutely nothing about the currency of Laos Kip (except that time my boyfriend took on a bet to snort some salt in return he would receive 1000 Kip which is the equivalent of $0.12 - saddened by the realization only AFTER the bet took place.)
Anyway, each time we used a tuk tuk we paid 50 000 kip for about 5 minutes drive.
A walk in the park, visiting TEMPLES and blessed by a monk.
In their culture and religion it's GOOD LUCK to release birds from a cage. As we need all the luck we can possibly get - we did exactly that.
The resting Buddha.
Our hotel view.
Hotel breakfast.
Certainly needed a ton of coffee for this trip.
Our trip was a tiring one.
Even though it was tough and frustrating at times, we did have some great moments being in the country of LAOS.
I'm not saying we were sad to go home, because we practically ran as fast as we could to the airport and boarded the plane smiling ear-to-ear.