jobsworth

2 minutes ago, ubonjoe said:

The may have immigration at boat or ferry landings but no visa on arrival office on the Lao side.

That is certainly how it is at Savannakhet. I have heard you can take a boat from Savannakhet to Mukdahan but have never seen it confirmed.

yes i remember now that i had a lao visa from bangkok

when i took the boat. that was fun.

it is a long time since i visited nong kai and laos.

since the bridge was built can you no longer take a ferry boat

across the mekong river?

or has that service stopped?

last time i did have to use the new bridge and take an overloaded

cramped bus across.

never again will i travel on that bus.

it was the worse 5 minutes of my life.

9 minutes ago, patrick1968 said:

if that was a girl ,,,wood you still have problems with it ,,,

How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood

sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't. depends on which payment gateway you use. one time i had 2 fraudulent payments to vodaphone. my credit card company refunded the fraud. a khmer told me that they do like this as an act of protest against the government, another time i had to make several telephone calls before they delivered. it is worth using this service to save a page in your passport. go for it. it is well worth the risk. always say that you are crossing into cambodia next week. the crossing can be any time 3 months after that. otherwise your application will go to the bottom of the pile. good luck.

are you homeless? do you look a bit rough? do you have tattoos? then you could join world vision and gang stalk all those bad white people. all expenses paid and a good salary or so i am told.

paypal was run by elon musk who wants to take us all to mars.

i know that he has sold paypal to ebay.

so that there was a slight improvement in service.

paypal is a great idea but the experiences are often bad.

paypal has been scammed many times in the far east

and that i think is still the problem with paypal.

the fundamental questions are who are you, where did you come from and where are you going to. most religions supply the answers to most of these questions and so are accepted by most people. the truth is much deeper than that and most people don't want to know.

avoid buying electronics at sim lim. the cheating has got so bad that the authorities have put up warning notices for tourists,

just wait until margaret thatcher gets elected in thailand. then you will see how expensive a kilowatt hour or unit of electricity can become.

koh kong is finished. battambang is dead. kampot still has some spark.

thailand is better and cheaper. it wasn't always so.

i refer to amenities that make a place attractive to visitors

and not just copies of what you are trying to escape from.

like trees, nature and wooden houses and welcoming people.

i seem to remember once applying for a thai visa in india.

i used an agent and all went well.

only the photograph was problematic.

the photograph had to show two ears and no smile.

would make a good title for a john le care novel.

just go to the photocopy shop on the floor below CW. tell them what you are doing and they will give you what you need.

sounds like fun. i always wanted to visit north laos.

vientiane - vang vien - luang prabang - phongsali.

20 years ago they would not allow foreigners to do this because of attacks by hmong.

a friend of mine did it in a truck. they were shot at long range with ak47.

10 years ago i tried to do the journey with an isaan lady who could understand lao.

the tourist mini bus to vang vien was $7. the government bus was $1.

the mini bus driver was a maniac and so we disembarked and continued by tuk tuk.

vang vien is a backpackers mecca with air america runway and river for swimming.

the government bus to luang prabang was ok but all the hotels were full of thais who had flown from bangkok

on package tours for 4000 THB.

so that was the end of it. never have been to phongsali. did not return down the river for 2 days to thailand.

took all the busses back to nong kai in thailand.

2 weeks later one of the busses was shot up by hmong tribesman and all the passengers were killed.

i hope that you make it to north laos. it is certainly an adventure.

my memories of a visit about 10 years ago are of narrow tall houses like Amsterdam because of a property tax on the length of frontage.

then there were the terrible touts like the Arabs in morocco. my tout acquired me at the bus station and never let up for 3 days.

a good tout can be a useful friend if you don't know anything. This one wasn't.

he took me to a $10 hotel where the only thing that worked was the internal telephones.

the building being so small was arranged as a shop on the ground floor, storage on the floor above, the family on the next 2 floors and tourists on the 2 floors above that. There was no lift.

The upper floors of ho chi minh smelt of rotten eggs (hydrogen sulphide) from a local factory.

the food was over priced and bad like chow chow, a sort of spam.

what was interesting was the fruit and vegetable market. the professional people like doctors and lawyers who worked for the Americans cannot get a job and so work there. I flirted with an ex American nurse who was happy to practice her English.

the interview form for all jobs requests details of the applicant's war service. of course they were not Viet Cong and so have a problem.

the travel agents all seemed to be white foreigners trying to sell trips to bo lat which was supposed to be so much nicer.

the best attraction was the museum of French and American atrocities including a guillotine and a 3.5 inch rocket launcher.

3 days was enough. later in bangkok i met a Vietnamese worker who confirmed to me that ho chi minh was best avoided. He told me that when friends came to visit him he did not know where to take them.

i always laugh when i see thai tramps helping themself to a meal eating and drinking off a spirit house. nobody seems to stop them or even be offended.

I applied for a re entry permit last week using the download from MFA website (Pinned on TV). Other than insisting upon having my phone no on the back there was no difference to my last one some years ago.

HTH

your phone number is worth money and can be sold to deliver you with spam. same at the banks. avoid giving your phone number wherever possible.

i always ask why and if they cannot give me a reason i write "NO SPAM".

I was told by a teacher, that due to the shortages of foreign language teachers, the school was reluctant to get rid of anybody.

the shortage of foreign language teachers is hardly surprising. while this teacher may be guilty many of those accused are not. there is big money involved.

and an especially big kick to the ngo's who sit for hours spying on white people.

don't forget that general Prayuth probably reads these posts.

remember that thai people find white western skin very beautiful

and darker skinned thai ladies ugly by comparison.

try Stanfords in London. they do air navigation maps of most of south east asia from the vietnam war and after.

if you are looking for a bartholomews type map forget it. they are even older than that and really inaccurate.

you bikers. can't you just use satellite navigation.

this thread has certainly brought the cockroaches out of the woodwork.

the visa price at the koh kong border is not $37 but 1500 thb or about $47.
"john you be quiet. we need to earn some money."

the christians in my country england behaved in the same way.

second commandment:-

thou shalt have no graven images before me.

or

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image

most of the stone circles built by the celts (we think) were destroyed.

St Columba in Iona and Lindisfarne.

it is christianity that needs to be examined.

muslims are no worse than christians and in many cases better.

it is religion itself that must take the blame.