Bye, bye, Chiang Mai! (And Greet-angs, Luang Prabang!)

We first arrived in Luang Prabang from Chiang Mai after approximately 10 hours of travel.

It had been an early start for our family, with a morning flight that required us to wake up at 5 am. There are surprisingly few direct flights from Chiang Mai to Luang Prabang, despite their proximity. And so our flights connected through Bangkok to the south, meaning we more or less flew 1 hour south, had a 3 hour layover, and then just over an hour right back north. Not a great route from a carbon emissions perspective. And in the end, it only saved a few hours over driving, which would have taken approximately 12 hours (plus stops and customs).

However, one advantage flying provided us was the opportunity to view Luang Prabang from above as we arrived. Looking out our plane windows as our flight descended into the airport, we were immediately struck by the raw natural beauty of Laos. Curtains of lush mountains stretched to the horizon and framed what looked like a one-runway airport, with wisps of mist enveloping their lower slopes. The views were absolutely stunning, and made for a pretty incredible first impression.

The area was a lot more rural than we had been expecting, which was a nice change from our recent visits to the more built-up areas of Thailand and Bali. We would later be told by a local that Luang Prabang is similar to what Chiang Mai was like 50 years ago. How cool is that?

Having read that airport customs could be slow, we hustled to get to the customs counter. Because we had purchased an e-visa in advance, we were able to join the customs line before many others on the flight, who had to queue to purchase a visa at the airport. Notably, the e-visa cost us each 50 USD, while the airport visa appeared to cost 40 USD (although there may have also been other fees).

(Pro tip: choose the middle foreigner customs queue, as a second line popped up out of nowhere leading to our customs agent on the far left, and we suddenly had twice as many people in front of us than when we started.)

After we got through customs, we collected our luggage at the baggage claims directly behind the customs desk, and then exited the secure area. In the outer lobby, there is a single airport taxi desk right by the door that charges a flat rate into town, which for us as a family of four was 160,000 kip (just under 8 USD).

We didn’t have any Laotian kip on hand (you can’t get them outside of Laos), so we asked about the cost if we paid in Thai baht. They advised it would be 350 THB (just under 10 USD). Instead of paying the markup, we just went to the forex counter a few stalls down and exchanged a small amount of baht for kip (which we needed anyways). Note that the airport currency exchange rates are not as good as those you can get in town, so it’s probably not the best place to change over large amounts of cash.

We did have a few small things go sideways on arrival. First, we had thought that our global Airalo eSim would work in Laos, but for whatever reason Laos is not included in their “global” plan. So a fail on our parts for not checking this in advance. And because we’d thought we would have internet on arrival, the directions we had to our Airbnb were somewhat lacking (partly because the Airbnb did not have a proper civic number), although we did manage to pull its location up on a cached Google map on our phones and direct our taxi driver there by pointing and gesturing. In retrospect, we should have just picked up physical SIM cards at the airport.

The second thing that went sideways was that we discovered our “taxi” was actually a shared van with 3 other sets of people. This meant multiple stops at hotels around the old town before we were dropped off at our Airbnb, all while we were somewhat squished in the back with our random travel partners. This was not disclosed before we paid for transport, but ultimately it was just fine and didn’t delay our arrival too much.

In the end, we made it to our Airbnb relatively unscathed (if a little tired), where our amazing host was waiting to greet us and show us around our new home away from home.