Hua Guo Guesthouse Vientiane

... for all of us travelers away from home missing turkey, stuffing and an afternoon of football.

No such luck.
But I wasn't going to let that stop me. I went to the local night market's food stalls which I had been scouting out for days in anticipation of Plan B. I bought a half of a grilled chicken (close enough to turkey I thought), some potatoes both sweet and non-sweet which I proceeded to mash in their banana leaf wrapping, a papaya salad (closest thing to salad I ...

... and are still just sitting there. People dig them up to sell them, or children (or adults) mistake “bombies” for fruit or a ball, and start collecting them or playing with them. It’s absolutely tragic.

There is a prosthetics workshop and hospital on the site, but for tourists there is a visitor’s centre where you can learn about all of this. They have excellent displays and samples of the bombs or scrap metal, as well as ...

Finally....sorry it's taken so long...



Oh my god...can't believe we are still alive!!

We flew from Siem Reap to Vientiane via Paske with Laos Airlines (they were the only airline to fly to Vientiane from Siem Reap). The flight to Paske started without a hitch...new airplane and it looked OK. Take off was fine, a little turbulence... that's OK we can handle that but the descend was terrible. We honestly thought ...

... She works for her father's business in Bangkok but now she works in Vientiane temporarily. We also went to her office where she asked some colleagues to help out on how I could best buy my onward bus ticket. She even arranged for some guys to take me to the bus terminal 9km out of town to buy a ticket.
In the end it I could not buy a bus ticket in advance, they told me there were plenty of buses and I should just buy on the ...

... got a free shot of tiger whiskey anyway. The girsl went of the the next bar as we still had a big beer between us all so we played a few drinking games and the left. Next stop was the Q Bar which was loaded with people and load as hell, this is probably the first bar i've seen where it was really going off in. We stayed in there for a few hours drinking buckets of god knows what and then moved on to another bar on the river ...

Got to the bus station 20 mins early, good and ready to catch the VIP bus to the capital.

Well, a sawngthaew (covered truck that takes passengers on hard benches in the back) pulled up and asked if we wanted a ride. We repeated “to Vientiane???' Usually these trucks just cart people around town. Anyway, we decided to act like locals and screw the VIP bus as the truck was only 30,000 instead of 60,000! Before really thinking through the next ...

... 1504;ו חשבנו עוד כמה היה עלינו לעבור עד שהנהר היה נרגע. לסיום קנינו צמידי 01; שיזכי 12;ו לנו את ...

... i.e. churches, don't have a bit more bling or mythical creatures. I'm pretty sure attendence would sky-rocket if they were as jazzy and beautiful as the temples out here. (please do not burn me at the stake, I'm just speculating!) Tomorrow we are having a pool day simply because we are roasting from today and I'm pretty sure Dave will wither up to a prune type object if he sweats anymore. So onto Cambodia the next day, and will have hit 3 out of the 4 countries!

... that is leaving next week, you name it, they said it. I was called in for being a virgin and for being a front runner.

Along the trail there are either chalk spots, circles of chalk, X's, or a circle with a H in the middle, which is where you had to stop and wait on everyone and they could decide if they wanted to continue or not from there. These were the 1/3 marks I spoke of. The circle without the H meant that the trail could go anywhere from there. It was usually at an ...

... with a possibly still tore UCL. Oh, and I bowled a 119 left-handed so you all can be impressed....haha jk)



The next day, Liron and I rented bikes for our lazy man's walking tour of Vientiane, which began with a trip to their fake Arc de Triumphe, which was one of those things that looks good from afar, but is far from good....kinda like Siena's baseball field when I was there. From there we biked it up a "slight" incline, which since I'm out ...