Day 4 – Bangkok and Luang Prabang 2016

October 22, 2016

Click photos to enlarge:

I arrived in Luang Prabang around 5:30 AM in the morning via the bus I boarded in Chiang Rai 16 hours before.

I left my bags at the Lotus Villa, but couldn’t check in my room yet as it was too early. This is what the room looks like when I eventually got to check in later in the day.

I walked around town and took some photos. Please click the < and > on the left and right edges of the photos to advance to the next picture in the slideshow.

Had lunch at La Rosa, a nice Italian place with great pizza.

I bought a Unitel sim card from the Lotus Villa hotel. They sold it with cheaper prepaid data plans than the bank. The bank in town also doubles as a dealer for Beeline (the other Laotian telco) sim cards and prepaid data plans. Some of the local stores also carry sims but it was hard to communicate so I just went with the hotel.

The Unitel sim card had lines marked out for nano and micro sims, but no perforated cutout. The hotel staff had to cut it manually using scissors.

Unitel’s mobile data coverage was pretty good for a developing country, even when I biked around random places in Luang Prabang, I would still get 3 bars of signal. I did not encounter losing signal or even having 3G drop to E while outdoors. Although, it would drop to E sometimes indoors in my hotel room.

The data speeds weren’t the fastest. I only ever got 3G signal, not 4G/ LTE, but I don’t recall it being any slower than what I was used to in the Philippines, even when my signal indicator back home said 4G.

It was slower than the 4G/ LTE data speeds I experienced for a couple of days with TrueMove in Bangkok, but Thailand probably has a more advanced 4G infrastructure.

More photos from when I went to walk around in the afternoon: