We got up, showered and dressed for 7.00am and went to the little room where breakfast was being served. We were given a bowl of rice soup with some sort of meat in it. It was disgusting! James did well though eating a bowl and a little of mine. We sat with the two girls from yesterday, Sam and Steph, they couldn't eat it either. After not eating it we went and bought a cup of coffee each which was much better. We got our things together and waited for the minibus to the border. Once on the border we had to queue for immigration to get our stamp out of Thailand. We then had a short walk down to some small boats which had around 10 people and their luggage in each which took us on a five minute crossing over to Laos. The boat pulled up to the bank which seemed quite high and difficult to get off, other boats pulled into lower parts which seemed much better. But actually it seemed the higher the better, ours was easy to get off where as the lower ones people were getting off into mud. Our friends Sam and Steph were on a lower boat, Steph stepped off first in thick mud and lost both her flip flops and mud came up to her mid calf! We were then pleased we were not on that boat! Next we had to apply for a Lao Visa, we had two forms to fill out, one for the visa, one for the entry into the country. We had our $36 each and a passport photo we just had to now wait for the enormous queue. We found out the queue seemed bigger than it was because they were processing visas into passports in batches so lots of passports would get passed through then nothing would happen for a good 20 minutes, and then we had to wait for them to get back to us. Once we got them and found Sam and steph again we had to wait for everyone else on our package before walking a little way to a shop handing over our passport again in order to get our boat ticket. We then got taken in small groups in tuk tuks to a restaurant where we waited for everyone else then passports were given back with boat tickets and we could go down and get on the boat. There were two boats and we were shown onto the second one, our bags got taken and stored, we got seats then some guy said this boat wasn't going, only one boat was going today.
There were all sorts of arguments as the other boat was pretty much full where were we supposed to sit and apparently we had seat numbers!
Eventually some people started moving over to the other boat so everyone then had to go otherwise we'd be left behind. There was an engine room with seats in, local people were sat on them but they got moved probably because they didn't actually have a ticket and we were given the seats. The journey was so noisy we had to have permanent loud music on. It was ridiculously hot so every now and then we got up and stood at the window for air. It was a very long 7 hour journey and it didn't help it started off that way, it meant there were quite a few of us in permanent bad moods! When we got there everyone started piling into the engine room for their bags before we could even get out so it just topped it off. We had to walk up some stairs and then a bloke found us because we had a sticker on for his guesthouse which we got in the travel package. We waited to see if anyone else wanted to come with us before getting in. One guy got off the boat with a big backpack on and said "so this bag isn't mine" because it was dark and the backpack was black someone had taken his by mistake so he picked up the very last one there hopefully it will get sorted on tomorrow's boat. We drove in the back of a pick up to the guesthouse which was only a five minute drive. We were given room keys and filled in some paperwork, we then decided to get something to eat here because we were really hungry, we also ordered a sandwich for tomorrow morning. We want to get up early enough to get a proper seat this time but it's apparently a longer journey so food is needed. We had a walk into the small town there and had a beer each before walking back and getting a good nights sleep, it had been a very long day.