Today we left Lao to go into Thailand. It was a bit confusing for us, but we thought we would muddle our way through.
Neither taxi driver could take us over the bridge from the Lao checkpoint to the Thai checkpoint, so we were dropped off at the Lao checkpoint, walked with our luggage through customs and immigration. The scanned my golf bag and Rosie’s but lost interest in Neil and Debbie’s. This took 5 minutes maximum.
We then lined up for a bus which cost $1 each. Before we knew it, we were walking to the bus and putting our golf bags in the underneath luggage bays. Onto the bus, standing only for us silly foreigners.
Once we crossed the Mekong 5 minutes later, we hopped off the bus and walked through Thai immigration and 5 minutes later we were outside looking for our Thai taxi. A process I had allowed an hour for took a total of 20 minutes (or less). Strangely our taxi wasn’t waiting for us yet so we sat down and read our books for half an hour.
Along came Mr Non and we were off again.
Bruce decided it might be nice to stop at the Chinese Cultural Centre in Udon for morning tea. This was supposed to be very nice and in a way it was. It was sitting on the edge of a big lake and you could see the signs of the recent Chinese New Year celebrations. We got some good photos of the Chinese dragons that weren’t put away yet.
We then walked around the cultural centre, which had several wall carvings depicting stories of Chinese folklore.
Thanks to Google Lens, I was able to translate the inscriptions. The first one I translated was about a son who had to taste his father’s faeces to see if was sweet or tart. Sweet meant dad was very sick. The second one was about a son who was a high official but went home regularly to see his mother. While visiting, he would clean out here faeces bucket as a show of respect. If I had time, I really would like to have seen if all the carvings had the same theme.
We then had our morning tea and continued on our journey to Khon Kaen. It was a successful day and our hotel, Nadee 10, is fantastic. Rosie can’t believe I actually picked such a nice place.
