Capital city?
Trip Start
May 12, 2005
1
19
33
Trip End
Sep 11, 2005
Vientiane,
Lao Peoples Dem Rep
Friday, June 24, 2005
The hostel owner seemed too relaxed about the timing of catching the bus for my liking, and sure enough, when we reached the hotel where I was supposed to catch it, it had already gone! We caught up with it 200m aruond the block, where it had stopped at another hotel to pick someone up. It then proceeded slowly around the block, stopping in various places for pick-ups, passing very close to my hostel and eventually setting off from the hotel where I'd been supposed to catch it 45 minutes later... No wonder the Lao hostel guy had been laughing at me for wanting to get a move on!
I spotted Elena, the British girl I'd met in Nong Khiaw, on the bus and when we got to Vientiane, four hours later, we decided to find a guesthouse together.
Lonely Planet let me down for once. The hostel was clean-ish, but very basic and had very old, tatty furnishings and bedclothes. However, with a shared room and bathroom down the corridor, $2 each per night was pretty cheap for capital city accommodation.
After sorting out our stuff and having a little snooze and a short walk, Elena and I went to a Lao restaurant nearby, while it absolutely poured down with rain.
In the morning, I went for breakfast at the Joma bakery (run by the same people as the lovely bakery at Luang Prabang) and then found a travel agency that could sort out my visa for Cambodia and my overnight bus to Pakse. I opted for the non-VIP (but still a/c) bus, which was all of $2.50 for the 11+ hour trip, rather than $3.50.
Elena and I went to the main market to look around and have lunch, then she left to get her bus for Thailand. I spent most of the rest of the day wandering round the city centre, trying very hard to find things to like about Vientiane.
It actually wasn't as bad as I'd first thought - there were several little streets with interesting handicraft workshops on them, although I had to abandon the attempt to look at the goods in one shop as it was too dark - the electricity had just gone on the blink. The back streets, side streets - and even some of the front streets - had been transformed into even more of an obstacle course than usual, due to the rain: I had to negociate puddles, mud, open drains in the middle of the pavement, half-finished pavements and piles of sand and bricks!
I took myself around the main sights in the city centre, including the "black stupa" which is the national symbol of Laos; a temple with cloisters filled with thousands of Buddha statues; and the beautiful royal temple which is now a museum.
After an early night and breakfast at another lovely bakery, I went to the national museum, where I had to control the urge to laugh out loud: the descriptions of the exhibits were even more extremely nationalistic than the museum in Hanoi, if that is possible. "Glorious Lao revolutionary women working in heroic textiles factory" anyone?
In the afternoon, having exhausted all the sights in the city centre I hired a tuk-tuk driver to take me to a temple on the outskirts of the city which was famed for its herbal saunas and massages. It was my first "Thai" massage and with lots of pulling, pushing and twisting, was hardly relaxing! I came out of it feeling like a new person: I'm sure my arms and legs had been taken off and swapped over...
The tuk-tuk driver had agreed to pick me up and take me to the Golden temple, which was shut, then I walked back to the centre via Vientiane's very own Arc de Triomphe.
I turned up at the travel agency early and chatted to the ittle man there: a Man U fan! When the taxi he had booked to take me to the bus station didn't turn up, he got out his own car and drove me there himself! He even stayed until it was time to board the bus to make sure I actually got the seat he'd booked for me - no 1!
As usual in Laos, the bus was overbooked, but not by much this time. And there were no chickens in sight, so it was a relatively comfortable journey, despite the dripping air-conditioning and the fact that the teenage Lao girl sitting next to me had only two modes: fast asleep with her head on my shoulder (no amount of nudging could budge her in the slightest); or sitting bolt upright crooning along out of tune to the already awful Lao karaoke being played on the screen at the front of the bus (i.e. just in front of us).
However, I did manage some sleep - perhaps thanks to the massage (!) - and managed not to be completely bullied by the tuk-tuk driver who clobbered me and an Israeli guy when we got off the bus at Pakse two-and-a-half hours earlier than the 13 hours billed. He was in a great big rush to take us to the 'other' bus station in Pakse, 8km away to catch his mate's sawngthaew to the jumping off point for the boat to Don Det, which was "just about to leave". We haggled the price a bit, and set off on a frenzied ride between the north and south Pakse bus stations to catch the 7am bus. As it turned out, the sawnthaew didn't actually left until 8am, so it was just as well that we'd haggled!
The Lao people on the sawngthaew were again very nice, despite the lack of room and my inability to say more than "hello": I even got two kids to smile at me this time - quite a feat in this country, at least! It was the usual stopping and starting affair, enlivened this time by vendors of a huge variety of snacks, who stuck them through the rails of the pick-up truck every time we stopped in a village. All good fun, but I must admit I was a little taken aback by the barbequed cockroaches on a stick enthusiastically thrust in my face in one of the villages!
After four hours in the sawngthaew; and a 20-minute boat ride, we were finally on Don Det, one of the most southerly of Si Phan Don, or 'Four Thousand Islands'.
Cathy
