My First Visa Run: From Thailand To Vientiane, Laos

Chiang Mai Rice field

Heaven on earth… Chiang Mai. I can’t explain it. All I can say is this city is heaven on earth. The second largest city in Thailand captured me and after 90 days I went for a visa run to Vientiane, Laos, because I wasn’t ready to leave.

I took a local coach bus with a dozen monks towards the Lao border. The ticket costed around 750 baht and included a meal, water, a snack and a blanket for the night.

visa run   tuk-tuk

In Nong Khai, a tuk tuk, my legs and a bus took me to the immigration at the border and I filled out a form for a visa on arrival. After getting the Laos visa for 1500 baht a bus took me over the friendship bridge and the river to Vientiane city. I directly went to the Thai embassy, exchanged my paperwork for a number and was asked to come back the next day after 1.30 pm. Luckily, the tourist visa for Thailand is free right now until the end of February 2017. Crossing the border for the first time was interesting. Seeing how similar but still different everything was.

Vientian
Vientian

Vientiane is a very small city but surprises with many unexpected gems throughout town. The rest of the day passed by with travelers from all over the world, speaking different languages but enjoying the same country and culture. Due to my strong will to go back to Chiang Mai very quick, I picked up my visa the next day in the afternoon and did everything I did the day before but backwards.

warorot-market

As exciting as it was to enter a new country it filled my heart with sunshine to go back to Thailand and being able to have a small talk with the locals.

Share this post

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *


The reCAPTCHA verification period has expired. Please reload the page.

Author

What makes learning with Ling special

Interactive exercises

Improve your pronunciation by starting a conversation with our app’s interactive chatbot

Engaging activities

Practice your skills with mini-games and track your progress with fun quizzes

Mix of languages

Choose from over 60 languages, both big and small, and listen to audio from native speakers

Proven results

Backed by linguistic research, our learning methods can help you achieve fluency in record time