Buddha Park

We woke approaching Vientiane nicely rested, because the night bus was a huge improvement on the Vietnamese torture machines. At last something that is better than Vietnam! Lao night buses having you lying down properly in two layers, like bunk beds. The only potential draw back is that they are all double beds, so you don’t know who you are going to be sleeping with if you are on your own. Of course, as a couple, this was much nicer for us.

According to the books Vientiane is actually pronounced something like Wang Chan, but because the Roman transliteration was done by the French, it doesn’t really come out right if you say it as if it’s an English word. The LP says that it starts with a “V” because French does not have letter “W”, although I’m sure I remember a letter called “doobleh-vay” so I don’t know what they are talking about. Maybe it’s a recent introduction into the French alphabet, because of imported words from English. “Whisky” comes to mind. The same goes for the “ch” sound: does not exist in French, so they chose “tia” as the next closest sound in French. Anyway, everything in Lao seems to have several different spellings, because there is a move to the Royal Thai method of transliteration, which the LP assures us is much more understandable by everyone, although I think it just makes it easier for English speakers. Having said all that, I only ever heard people saying itas
it looks in English, so maybe the spelling has led to a difference in pronunciation between the Lao and the English versions of the city name.

Our main goal in Vientiane was to obtain a Thai visa. We had only recently discovered this would be necessary due to a recent rule change which means that, while people arriving by air get the usual thirty day visa on arrival, people arriving overland are only given fifteen days, which is nothing like enough for what we want to do. Apparently it’s something to do with the airport protests last year and they are also trying to discourage people from doing the Thai “visa run” where people spend a day just over the border in Burma, for example, simply so that they can get another thirty days stamped on their passports when they return. Well not any more they can’t! Only when we arrived did we discover, to our delight, that for a limited period only, they are giving away sixty day tourist visas and waiving the fee. I think they must be trying to make up for the additional inconvenience they are causing people. Despite this good news it was still a real
painto get the visa. It was very hot and humid, there were hundreds of people waiting, and it took more than half-a-day just queue to hand our passports in and then queue again for the receipt. I sneaked off for a quick beer while Joanne was waiting for our number to come up and ended up the only person in a strange biker bar (I think), playing old French music. The town seems to be a bit more French than anywhere else in Laos so far, and it shows in some of the architecture.

The arc de triomphe or “vertical runway”

On the way back from the Embassy, we stopped in at the post office to get information regarding our other mission in Vientiane, which was to post home some of the stuff we really should not have brought with us. The post office appeared to be in the middle of being built, but we managed to find a way in anyway. The prices for posting a parcel was far more than we had anticipated: about 10 quid a kilo. After an unsuccessful attempt at finding a shipping company instead, we returned to our hotel to estimate which of the items we wanted to send were worth enough more than a tenner a kilo to send rather than bin. Most things passed, so items like my linen suit, which I hadn’t worn since the wedding despite huge intentions of playing the colonial part, we put aside for parcelling up. Also on the list were my jeans, my second, thick fleece, and loads of other stuff that seemed to be taking up far too much space, but not tooo much weight.

Local speciality of Vientiane

Side dish for local speciality

That evening we had dinner overlooking the Mekong at a place that seemed lovely until all the insects from the reeds started closing in. Despite that, the food was excellent: I had a local speciality, naem I think, a dish consisting of fish fried with balls of cooked rice then broken up and served like a salad with greens on the side. After dinner when we went for a drink, it started to rain again. And it rained very heavily with another huge electric storm. I started to think that monsoon had started early. It would have to be about two months early, but March only gets about three days of rain on average and we’d already seen more than that.

Weird dish of wobbly rice paper, nuts, and sausage

The following day we spent another half day collecting our passports from the Thai embassy, complete with our brand new (free!) Thai visas. Later in the day we got chatting to a couple from Australia, who were heading towards Cambodia: in the opposite direction from us. They had just come from Vang Vieng and had had to part company with a friend, so he could be flown to Bangkok on account of the injuries he had sustained while “Tubing”. Since Vietnam people had been telling us about the injuries that they or their friends had endured whilst involved in this activity. I still wasn’t very sure exactly what it was, but it involved floating down a river in a big inner tube (the type we’d seen people floating in, in Don Det we reckoned), stopping off at various pubs for drinks, then returning to the water via various flying foxes and shutes. So a watery pub crawl. The dangers are obvious, but the sheer number of injured people we had seen was unsettling. We had initially decided to give Vang Vieng a miss as it just sounded like the gap year crowd going wild but, despite all the injuries, everyone we’d spoken to told us it was not to be missed. This Oz couple were no exception, even though their friend had been having seizures two days after cracking his skull off some rocks, and now appeared to have fluid building up in his increasingly swolen head and face. Not nice! We had initiated the converstation by asking whether the girl’s obvious nasty scrapes were down to Tubing, but apparently it was only a moped accident. Her boyfriend had allowed her to drive for once and they had both come off, so I learned a lesson there from them.

Tom yum soup with heating coals

It was a terrible day for blogging. This website has some problems with drafts of blog entries going live without the bloggers say-so and I had noticed that my mum commented on an entry that was supposed to be a draft and therefore hidden to everyone but me. Clearly it was no longer a draft, but when I logged in and reset the (really quite long) entry to be a draft again, the whole thing disappeared. Completely! That night I dreamt of the death of a friend and my unborn child and the difficulties in getting their remains shipped home. Both fictional characters, but it was a very unpleasant dream. The following day I discovered that Google had cached my lost page and I copied it all to a draft email in Yahoo mail (where I now write all my post now). Praise be Google! I spent the day trying to catch up on lost blog time while Joanne posted home our items worth more than a tenner a kilo.

“Laogria”

We had another storm that day and I started to worry about the warm clothes I’d just sent home, as it seemed much cooler and we actually felt cold. I asked a few people, but everybody said that this was not too unusual and it was still months before the monsoon. The following day it still felt cold. A quick check online confirmed that it was indeed much colder than we’d become accomstomed: only 30 Celsius! We found a really good value foe (noodle) place for breakfast, where they seemed quite surprised to have falangs turn up, but then we had to go for coffee and ended up in a falang orientated coffee place and blew all the gains we’d just made on coffee, but when we were tempted into buying a brownie we’d effectively spent our lunch money as well!

Our third and final mission for Vientiane was to visit the strange sounding place known as Buddha Park, so we got the very cheap local bus out to the location, but just as we got off one of my flipflops came apart. This was the same pair I’d had repaired in Siem Reap, although the guys repair was still good: now the strap had separated from the base. Some people would admit defeat at this point but in the interests of sustainability, the environment, and stinginess, I was determined to keep the shoes going. I tried the same trick as the shoe repair had done, by setting fire to the rubber, then pressing the loose bit in place. It lasted long enough to get us round Buddha park, but I was no expert and it was clearly not going to last much longer. I still had a pending repair to my hiking trainers after the trek in Cambodia, so I was nearly running out of shoes. Anyway, the Buddha park was indeed strange. I think only pictures can adequately describe it.

When we returned to town, we bought superglue, which worked much better in the shoe repair department. That night we re-discoverd a restaurant we’d stumbled on a couple of nights previously. It described itself as modern Lao cuisine, which I fancied the sound of, and this time we noticed that it is also a community action project, run by Friends International (http://www.friends-international.org/whatsnew.html#makphet), so we could feel ethically warm whilst indulging ourselves, which we wanted to do since we decided that we were leaving Vientiane the next day. The idea seems to be similar to Jamie Oliver’s restaurant Fifteen. The food was outstanding, easily the best we’d had thus far in Laos, even though the food has in general been excellent. If anyone reading this is ever in Vientiane you must go to this restaurant. Amongst our orders were buffalo and vegetable rolls, lao-lao marinated steak, and a durian and coffee shake (I couldn’t help it — Joanne said I would get no kisses for the rest of the day).

We were very pleased with our meal, after all it could have been our last; the next day we were going to Vang Vieng for Tubing!