Lao

The flight from Hanoi was relatively smooth and I was in Vientaine in an hour. The immigration formalities were simple and I stepped out into foyer. Where was everybody? Apart from a few people who obviously worked there, the place was empty. I hailed the single taxi (they must only need one) and got dropped off at a guesthouse. The centre of Vientaine was the same. Apart from a few people milling about in the streets, there was nobody there. After the hectic city life in Vietnam it was a real shock to the system!

I soon settled down and started to enjoy my new found tranquility. I wandered around town a bit to get my bearings. Vientaine itself isn't very pretty. It's full of concrete buildings (most of which appear to house NGOs with their white 4x4s in the driveway). I walked out to the Great Sacred Stupa which appears on the Lao flag. It's a nice enough place but didn't inspire much in me. The nicest thing about it is the fact that I just about had it to myself. It would be a rare thing to be the only tourist outside the Houses of Parliment, Buckingham Palace or the the Tower of London.

The Great Sacred Stupa, symbol of Lao, viewed through it's gateway, Vientaine.

Another site that I enjoyed seeing is Veintaine's Arc de Triomphe. It's quite out of place in amongst all the low concrete buildings and looks rather odd. The best thing about it for me was the fact that the locals call it the Vertical Runway because it was built from cement donated by the american government to build an airport with. I wonder whether the project was ever audited... I'd have loved to have seen the report!

The Vertical Runway.

I saw one or two other things of note in Vientaine, but to be honest, you can see Vientaine in a day. One final sight I went to see was Wat Si Saket. It is supposidly the oldest wat in Vientaine and is quite charming. It has niches all around its outer walls containing pairs of buddha images, a nice set of frescos on the walls inside the wat and an all round charming atmosphere.

The night before I moved on, I decided to pander to one of my weaknesses and go for a curry. The curry itself wasn't good at all, but a fight broke out in the restaurant - just like back home after the pubs have closed! As it turned out, it was only a couple of late-middle aged blokes having a go at each other, not quite the young bucks that are more commonly in these situations, but it made me nostalgic for my regular curry night back home.

My next stop was Vang Vieng. The bus ride there was a thrill a minute - a real roller coaster. At one point the driver swerved so sharply to avoid an oncoming lorry (whose lane he had actually drifted out into while careering around a bend) that I swear the bus was on 2 wheels for a moment. The gasps could be heard from all the passengers, locals and travellers alike. One local responded to the event by promptly spraying the contents of his stomach across the floor of the bus. I guess it was some kind of protest - the driver having to clean it up later...

Vang Vieng is a beautiful place, and a very welcome stop if you've been on the road for a while. It lies next to a group picturesque limestone hills, of a similar form to those I saw in Tam Coc and Halong Bay in Vietnam. A crystal clear river runs past the small town and there are wonderful views all around. However, the best thing about Vang Vieng for me was that the fact that the only things to do are outdoor activites. There were no temples, museums, old ruins or any of that other cultural stuff there that you feel slightly obliged to make the effort to go and see if you've come half way across the world (and will no doubt be a little jaded with if you've been travelling as long as I have now). It made a very pleasant change to the usual stop.

I got to know a group of friends and we set off to have our adventures in and around Vang Vieng. We went hiking and visited some spectacular caves in the limestone hills with huge spiders in them (inedible, unfortunately), we went biking and found a spot with a beautifully clear stream to take a dip in with fish swimming all around you, and we went tubing where you sit in an old tractor innertube and float down the river at an exceedingly leisurely pace. We stopped off at one cave along the river when tubing which was incredible. It was full of stalactites and stalagmites and just went on for ever. We must have taken over 45 minutes to walk to the end and back out again with our guide. We had to wade through water and mud up to our knees, brave more spiders until eventually we reached an underground pool where you can swim and listen to the colony of bats that live overhead.

The rustic bridge over the river at Vang Vieng.

A picture that spectacularly fails to capture the beauty of the river at Vang Vieng.

The blair witch project comes to Vang Vieng.

After recharging my batteries in Vang Vieng I moved on to Luang Prabang, a former capital city and renown for it's wats and culture. The bus journey there was breath-taking. The road winds through the hills giving spectacular views. In town I saw a few of the temples. Wat Mai and Wat Xieng Thong were the most beautiful for me with their graceful sloping roofs and geometric patterns on the walls. They also happened to be the oldest wats in Luang Prabang and consequently had a more authentic atmosphere which was nice just to sit down and soak up.

I saw the elections for the chief of the local tribe at one of the wats in town. It was a rather small affair with somebody ripping up an exercise book to make ballot papers for people to write on. It had more of an atmosphere of a village fate than a serious democratic process but the people seemed to be happy with the format and the way the poll was going.

I tried a Lao massage to find out what it was like. It turned out to be rather like Thai massage (unsurprisingly) but possibly even more forceful. Afterwards I felt invigorated but rather pummelled!

The Royal Palace Museum was an interesting place. It belonged to the King (or crown prince if you take the governments version of history - they claim the corination never took place) until he and the Royal Family disappeared and were never seen of again. The palace is very well maintained and contains lots of curious and beautiful exhibits. You can see several very lavishly decorated reception rooms and the throne room and then walk round the corner (the palace is not very big and is only one storey) to the king and queens bedrooms and a dining room decorated in an altogether different style - something similar to simple (verging on austere) 1930s French style - quite a contrast. The most important exhibit in the museum is the Prabang, a buddha image made from an alloy of gold silver and lead, and the symbol of the city. It's considered so valuable that it is only possible to view it through prison bars, behind which it and all the other treasures of the museum are stored. A new Wat is under construction in a corner of the palace grounds to house it. It was nice to see a wat under construction and see that the skills to do it were still there.

The new Wat being built to hold the Prabang.

The sun had come out by now and seemed to be trying to make up for the rain I experienced in Vietnam. The temperatures sored so a few friends and I decided to go and visist a local waterfall. The nice thing about this particular waterfall is that you can swim in a pool under one of the cascades. The water was very refreshing - just the ticket.

Having fun at the waterfall outside Luang Prabang.

I was planning to head further north in Laos to see the Plain of Jars (where hundreds of large stone jars are dotted around the landscape and nobody knows where they come from, why they are there or who put them there), the caves where the Royal Family disappeared to and another megalithic site where there is supposidly a Lao version of Stonehenge. However, with being rather tired with all my travelles so far, the prospect of several days on the back of a lorry driving over awful roads to get there didn't sound appealing. To add to that there had been reports of increased bandit activity in that area holding up vehicles and in the end I decided to head back to Vang Vieng for a couple more days relaxing the the great outdoors and then back to Vientaine.

Back in Vientaine I had to wait a couple of days for a Thai visa so I did a few of things I had missed out on my first visit. I went to the Buddha sculpture park just outside town near the friendship bridge (to Thailand). The park is not very big but contains the most amazing array of buddhist sculpture - plenty of which I'd never heard of or was at all able to understand. One piece was like the Giant Peach out of Roal Dahl's James and the Giant Peach. You could walk inside it and climb on top and at the core there were hundreds of sculptures of the buddha in various poses and lots more. Another curiosity was the octopus like head with tentacles sprouting out around it. It was a truely fascinating place.

The buddha sculpture park. The octopus-like sculpture viewed from the top of the Giant Peach.

The last place I visited was the Lao National Museum. It had an interesting display about the Plain of Jars and another about fossilised dinosaur bones and footprints found in southern Laos. The upper floor was dedicated to the revolution in Lao and was all too familliar after my visits to other museums around Indochina. One other exhibit caught my eye in the displays about Lao in the present. One of the cabinets contained information on the fight against drugs in the country and had on display samples of drugs that had been seized and they were labled exaclty as such. The packages of heroin, canabis, amphetamines and opium looked very realistic to me - bundled up as you imagine smugglers would do. Could it be that the items on display are genuine? There certainly weren't any labels to say that they were fake and not to bother trying to break the glass and steal them... I guess I'll never know.

Jars from the Plain of Jars in the garden of the Lao National Museum.

When I recieved my Thai visa I decided to head for the border the same day. the Friendship Bridge over the Mekong River to Thailand is a short tuk-tuk ride outside Vientaine. I exited Lao at the Lao immigration and jumped on the shuttle but to return to Thailand. It felt like quite a significant step. I'd completed my circuit of Indochina and was heading back to Thailand, my last stop before going home.