Vientienne

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Hey everyone

I am actually in Vang Vieng but thought I would just stick this one on now cos the internet connection in Vientienne was brutally slow.

After we got back to Bangkok we caught a bus from the Khao San road to Laos, poor old Dulce - on the way to the bus she stacked it complete with 2 tonne backpack as she walked past a dump truck down a narrow grotty alley! To be fair she got herself up and got on with it - but I swear to god she must have contracted weils disease on that path, Bangkok alley ways are absolutely manky and snotting it is never good! ;-)

The bus was pretty uneventful apart from the dodgy driver that wanted to overtake anything and everything and had the bus rocking from side to side quite a bit during the night! One thing about the Thai's is that they don't really tell you whats going on, so when we got to the Lao border they didn't bother to tell anyone, they just woke us all up and grunted at you for your passport and then walked off with it! Anyway after a three hour wait we eventually crossed on 'The Thai-Lao Friendship bridge' over the Mekong. We met a sound Canadian girl and an ex RAF English guy (Ian) on the bus and caught the bus from the bridge to Vientienne with them.

Vientienne is really really cool, I liked it alot. God bless the French when they conquer a country they do it in style - Vientienne is littered with little french patisseries and coffee shops and these beautiful French colonial buildings! We got off the bus right outside the central square and straight into one of the amazing patisseries! Air conditioning, cheddar cheese and Baguettes never tasted so good!

After stuffing ourselves silly, Ian and I set off to find some rooms - about two hours later we came back and got Dulce having been around every street and guesthouse in the city - its got to be the smallest capital city in the world - there's only 200,000 people. We scored a really cool room right by the Mekong river for $12 dollars a night. Everything here is quoted in dollars, their own currency is like monopoly money. 20,000 kip is the biggest note and I reckon that its worth about a pound!

The whole cash situation is becoming a bit of a problem actually - They convert their money to dollars and baht and then I've got to convert that to pounds, so I am sure that a few tuk tuk drivers have made an absolute fortune out of me!

Anway we did most of the sites of Vientienne in a day, but then thats not why we're here! They've got a complete rip off of the Arc d'Triomphe (or however you spell it) called the Patouaxi that they made using concrete that the Americans donated for a runway (actually that in itself kind of sums up Laos national history!) they never finished it and they've got a tourist sign hanging on it that explains what it means - except that they couldn't afford a copywriter so they copied the text word for word from lonely planet (and it reads - "... built in 1962 but never complete due to the country' turbulent history from a closer distance, it appears even less impressive, like a monster of concrete .... They sell it big eh! oh yeah and they're not typos thats the way they've written it! They've also got a Champs elysee rip off and a few interesting Wats but generally speaking they've been invaded so many times that there isn't that much that is older then 80 years!

The real beauty of Vientienne is the cafe culture, the way of life and the odd mix of communism that is thrown in! You can go from sitting in a really nice cafe (even on western standards) with smelly travellers and dimplomats (they're the only two types of westerners that you get here), to walking down the busiest street in the city (in the shadow of a french monument) where there is little more traffic then Maidstone on a Sunday, to the Lao peoples revolutionary museum which proudly flys the communist flag and has really old propaganda inside! All the weapons and pictures have titles like "Comrade hin used this carabine to shoot down the plane of an American Imperialist fighter bomber!"

The place is cool, but besides drinking copius amounts of beer lao (in old fashioned Guinness style pint bottles) whilst watching the sun set on the Mekong, there isn't a lot of grungy traveller things to do here. So we just lapped up the baguettes, eclairs, pain au chocolat, croissants and south american coffee whilst reading the Vientienne Times, which is a state controlled newspaper with stories like 'Vegetables are good for you' - ah communist world chic rocks!

We also found a really cool little bar (which again had a mix of diplomatic staff and smelly travellers) that had a Lao band that does the best cover of the cranberries - I don't think that they new what they were singing but they had the Irish accent down to a tee!!

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