We arrived in Vientiane last night from Vang Vieng on the "VIP" bus, the bus itself was fine but my seat position bar was broke was I was bopping forward and backwards the whole trip like one of those plastic dogs in the back of a car.
Today we had a pretty lazy day to be honest, just had a nice meal and went to the Thai consulate to sort our our visas, the consulate has moved (So don't rely on Lonely planet's 2007 Laos). It's about 4kms outside of town so a tuk tuk may be an idea depending on where you are (about 30-40000kip each way), Its address is at No.15 Ban Ponesinuan, Bourichane Road, Vientiane Capital (near Lao-Singapore Business College).
My advice to anyone going there is to make sure you have the following:
2 x Passport Pictures
1 Pen per person! (We had some but they looked scarce from what I saw)
Photocopy of your Passports Picture page and your last Visa (Laos Visa page and entry stamp)
The last one you can ignore as there's a copy guy in the embassy that'll copy for 1000kip per page (about 15 cents). Ignore the people who approach you outside that offer to "help" you fill in the forms, the forms are straightforward and these people are only looking to get a easy fee out of you (I saw plenty of people using them)
We arrived at around 10:30am and got out of there around 12:30am so no point in turning up early as the tour operators seem to get to the front of the line. The queueing system is chaos, we just started queueing shortly after they called out 350-400 (we were 522) and got processed no problem.
Tomorrow we've to head back to collect the passports and see some of this town..and go to south Laos or Thailand...decisions decisions.
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