Getting visas for China in Laos!

Welcome back everyone to the next step in our adventure hitchhiking from Thailand to Spain!

After spending a few days in Nong Khai relaxing we caught a tuk tuk to the border of Laos and then caught a local bus into Vientiane where we would spend a week organising our Chinese visas. We decided to do it here because we had heard of the nightmare stories of doing it in Bangkok! We got together all of our documents (including: passport copies, bank statements, travel insurance, hotel bookings, flight tickets in and out of the country and an itinerary of our stay). This list is pretty extensive but we didn't want to get rejected!
On a side note, the flight tickets were booked by an agency which then cancelled them 4 days later at a cost of 4$ per person and the hotel booking was made via agoda with free cancellation. The itinerary that we made was also completely false. We had to do all of these steps to get the visa even though we planned to cross by land in the north of Laos.

Whilst waiting for the visas (it took 3 working days) we explored the city a little and checked out the local markets.

During our time in Vientiane we also wanted to buy a camping stove but couldn't find one anywhere so we had to get creative and make our own 'cat stove'. This was made from tins and is used by putting in some high grade alcohol which we bought in a hardware shop (we were a little worried about the fumes as it had a skull and crossbone on it!).

Finally after waiting several days we made our way back to the Chinese Embassy to see if they had granted us our 1 month tourist visas! Thankfully there we no problems and this actually turned out to be one of the easiest visa applications we have ever done as there were no other tourists there and only 3 or 4 locals filling out applications inside!

China here we come! But first we need to travel to the north of Laos and the first part of this trip was hitchhiking to Vang Vieng. We had heard that hitchhiking in Laos was really tricky but our day was really smooth and only had to wait 5 minutes for our rides! Here are a bunch of photos from our journey to Vang Vieng.

If you would like to see our video about this see below!

Thanks for reading as always everyone and we would love to hear about your experiences trying to get visas to different countries and any crazy travel stories you may have!

Alex and Malin