A Flying Visit to Laos

A very brief stop on Laotian territory during a one-day excursion to the so-called "Golden Triangle", departing from and returning to Chiang Mai in Thailand. I was with two travel companions with whom I was doing a tour in Indochina also including Cambodia and Vietnam. We reached Laos with a long boat that, having set off from the Thai locality of Sop Ruak, crossed the Mekong river, landing on the river island of Done San. Here we got off for about forty minutes to visit the market of odds and ends and souvenirs. There was also a post box. We were given the entry stamp, applied however not on the passport but on a separate ticket. In fact this special area of Laos can be visited without the visa required for the rest of the country. To go to Don Sao it is enough to pay a fee of 20 Thai baht. At the market too you pay with the currency of neighbouring Thailand.

Here there is really nothing to see apart from a few ramshackle huts of the island's traders. This is the region straddling Laos, Burma and Thailand, until not long ago sadly famous for the cultivation and smuggling of opium. From here we took the long boat again and returned to the opposite bank of the Mekong from where we had set off. In Thailand neither the exit nor the entry stamp was required.