Hotel Lao Vientiane

... 1 of those was spent throwing up and the next 3 feeling like I wanted to throw up. My motto of always eating from the street stalls because that’s what the locals do and the foods always cooked fresh in front of you, went out the window. The only good thing was that Daphne, my Dutch friend, was ill too so we could sympathise with each other. Also Mama from our guesthouse took good care of us by dragging us out of bed and making us eat her rice ...

... sitting on top of me and stretching my limbs in all kinds of weird directions. Then out came the herbal warm sacks which she applied first shortly (still too hot), then let lie on my limbs. The herbs smelled lovely. All in all this was a thoroughly enjoyable massage and of course this lady did get a tip. <br><br>Dinner<br>That evening I had dinner with the Thai girl Al. We talked about this and that and it was fun to hear some ...

... become alive with lots of people wearing tight dresses, make up and high heels. What surprised us most was the very, very deep voice most had!<br><br>We spent our three days visiting different Wats (temples), a park filled with statues of hundreds of Buddha&#8217;s and watching the sunset over the Mekong River, that divides Laos and Thailand. One of the highlights was talking to the Buddhist monks at the Buddha park as they were keen to ...

... Presidents Palace und dem Haw Pha Kaeo und dem Wat Si Saket. In Letzterem gibt es ueber 7000 Buddhastatuen...fast ein bisschen uebertrieben :-)<br><br>Am zweiten Tag sind wir zum Patuxai (Triumpfbogen) gelaufen. Dieser sieht von Weitem relativ aehnlich aus wie der Namensvetter in Paris, aber aus der Naehe sind dann doch die laotischen Feinheiten zu erkennen. Auf der Aussichtsplattform hat man eine schoene Sicht auf ganz Vientiane ...

... t stop thinking about whether or not my ankle was going to swell up as soon as I got the shoe off and whether or not I could have gotten bacteria in that scrape on my knee from the tall grass. I told Wes that I was going to attempt to rush through dinner so that I could go home and check it all out. He said he had no problem leaving right then. So we did, I'm glad we did, otherwise we wouldn't have discovered this amazing yellow curry just down the street from the house. We had a ...

... so Erin and I expected another big Asian city full of hustle and bustle, but not so! It was like a ghost town. You could almost hear crickets and see tumble weeds blowing through the streets. We found an internet café and 'skype&#8217; called our Aussie friends, Roh and Rob. We ate dinner with them that night by the Mekong River. They persuaded us to go down south with them, which was not our original plan, but that&#8217;s half the fun of traveling on an ...

... in pretty good conditions and traffic quite ordered with people behaving while driving...so we could say that Vientiane looked to us like the Swizerland of south east Asia, we felt almost at home! The only thing that was exactly the same as in Cambodia was the heat: 40 degrees and 90% humidity which made almost impossible staying out in the middle of the day. We didn't find a lot to see in Vientiane: a couple of temples, a "golden stupa" said to contain few bones from the ...