Final few days in Laos..

Trip Start Mar 11, 2008
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Trip End Ongoing


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Flag of Lao Peoples Dem Rep  , Vientiane,
Friday, May 16, 2008

We weren't best impressed when we got to the kayaking office for our trip down to Vientiane, only to be told that 4 of the people booked onto our trip were still drunk and had cancelled their booking, dropping us below the requisite number of people for the trip to go. (Was it too much to ask that they use a modicum of restraint & drink just a little bit less on the evening before they were due to depart on a 7 hour kayaking excursion??!!) With pretty much no other option we had to resort to plan B - the bus. Not quite the idyllic float down the river we'd had in mind.. but on the plus side it did mean we made it into town in time for a final evening with Phil & Sarah before they head on down through South Laos while we hop across to North Vietnam.

Vientiane is a pleasant city with a relaxed atmosphere and surprisingly little traffic (either of the wheeled variety or pedestrian) for a SE Asian capital. It doesn't have a huge amount to offer by way of relics or sights having been pretty much flattened by the Siamese at the end of the 19th century, but it has launched us back into the (not unwelcome) world of authentic French cafes and creperies serving real French wine, cheese and charcuterie (hardly a Dairly Lee Triangle in sight!). We were inordinately excited by the dicovery of Phimphone supermarket - an expat-oriented place stocking just about every Western branded foodstuff the deprived traveller could possibly have been missing. I practically had to restrain Clare to stop her walking out with the whole shop!

We covered some of Vientiane's more accessible sights by foot on our first afternoon: Nam Phou fountain, The Presidential Palace, Lang Xang Avenue and Patouxai - a ferro-concrete victory monument commemorating Lao war casualties. Victory Monument, Vientiane
Victory Monument, Vientiane
 The latter two, legacies of Laos' French occupation, are allegedly meant to be Vientiane's answer to the Champs Elysees and Arc de Triomphe in Paris. I'll let you judge for yourselves from the photos!

The following morning we rented push-bikes and cycled out to That Louang (a gold-covered pyramidal Buddhist stupa), Laos' most important religious building and it's national symbol, then on to some of the city's other Wats, museums and exhibitions. I particularly enjoyed the Lao National Museum for its highly nationalistic (and highly entertaining) annotations of the exhibits, with frequent mention of  'the imperialist American invaders and their puppets' (comes as quite a culture shock when you are conditioned to Westernised museums where everything has to be protrayed from a somewhat more impartial view point!). There was also a really nice temporary exhibit about a Dutch emissary from the East India Company who visited Laos to try to establish trade links in the 1400's, which again entertained us with it's comparisons between daily life in 15th century Holland and Laos. (It would never have occured to me for example, to point out for the benefit of the locals here, that in the Netherlands the rivers freeze in winter and that poeple can even sometimes skate on them). In the evening I discovered that, contrary to my belief, it wasn't simply my sunburn that had made my last Laotian massage in Luang Prabang so painful.. they really are! The woman was absolutely brutal - pain pleasure ratio weighing heavily towards the former!!

This morning, our final morning in Vientiane, we've bussed out to the Xiang Khouan Buddha Park- a random collection of Buddha sculptures collected by a local religious nut in the 1950's - that provided endless opportunties for us to act our shoe-size and reel off amusing photos for the archives. Off to the airport for our 18:00 flight to Hanoi shortly once we've collected Clare's visa ..

Goodbye Laos, Vietnam here we come!
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