Rookie mistakes

As of yesterday I've been traveling for eight months. Wow. I'm starting to feel the pressure of impending deadlines. And I'm still making stupid, rookie mistakes.

I was in Luang Prabang, Laos, a great little town to relax and do nothing. But since time is becoming a factor I decided to keep moving. I took a bus to the town of Phonsavan to see an archaelogical curiosity called the Plain of Jars, then took a miserable overnight bus ride to Vientiane. (Blog posts are coming on all these places.)

There I planned to visit the US embassy to have pages added to my passport. (That's a pretty cool problem to have, eh?) Then I was going to apply for a visa to Vietnam and catch a plane to Hanoi. Vietnam is the only country in Southeast Asia that does not issues visas on arrival. Most places you can just show up, pay the fee, and they'll issue the visa on the spot. You have to arrange a visa for Vietnam in advance.

I arrived in Vientiane on Saturday. Embassies are closed on Saturday and Sunday. Duh.

As crazy as it sounds I decided to take yet another overnight bus to Bangkok, because it's easier and cheaper to arrange transport to virtually anywhere in Southeast Asia from there.

I made an appointment to go the US embassy and realized that the Embassy of Vietnam is on the same block. What a stroke of luck. So I went to the US embassy and did my thing there then walked down to the Vietnam embassy ... and read the note saying that it was closed for three days in honor of the Lunar New Year, which is huge holiday in Southeast Asia.

So the earliest I could even apply for a Vietnamese visa is Thursday. I didn't want to stay in Bangkok until then, so I hopped on yet another bus this morning and came back to Siem Reap, Cambodia.

For those of you scoring at home, that's three countries in three days.

Now I have to decide what to do about Vietnam. It takes a while to travel there because it's long and skinny. The two main cities are in the far north and far south. The main tourist attractions are in the north (Halong Bay) and south (Cu Chi tunnels, Nha Trang).

So do I rush through all of it? Concentrate on one half? Do half now and half in March? Or skip it? We'll see.

While I'm in Siem Reap I hope to knuckle down and post some blog updates. It's hard to get online when you're in a bus for 12 hours every frickin' day....