Vientiane

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After a rough over night bus ride we made it to Vientiane. I should mention that the sleeper busses here are an interesting contraption. There are no seats on the bus, just single bed compartments that they place two people in. So, if you are travelling alone and intend on taking one of these busses over night, be prepared to spoon up to a complete stranger as they will fill these busses right up. This particular ride was a hard one for us. Exhausted from the day kayaking, we packed into the bus hoping to get a good night's sleep. Unfortunately, 5 minutes into the ride we learned that the toilet didnt work, though a quick peek into the washroom lead me to believe I wouldnt want to go in there, even if it did work (imagine sitting on a toilet in a booth built for people two thirds your size strapped into the back of an old ford that's going 60kph down the worst logging road you've ever seen and you get the idea). On top of this it seemed the bus wouldnt go into 5th gear and then shortly after that it wouldnt go into 4th then it wouldn't get out of 1st. So 11 hours later we arrived in Vientiane, weary but happy to be halfway on our trip south.
The next sleeper bus didnt leave until evening so we caught a tuk tuk into town, found a guest house that would let us leave our bags there for the day and walked around town.
We didnt see too much of Vientiane but it was hot, dusty and polluted. That said it was still an interesting city and the highlight for us was our visit to the Buddha park an hour out of town. The Buddha park was built by an architect/designer in the 50s (I believe, you may want to google this rather than trust my half remembered facts) as a tourist attraction, though today monks come here to worship. There were possibly 8 people at most in the park when we got there, which was a stark contract to pretty much any other place we'd been since entering the country and was a nice change. We walked around the park checking out some of the 400 plus statues here, some of which are massive (there is a giant reclining buddha here). It was absolutely the coolest thing we'd seen in awhile and we took over 100 pics (again, will post soon!).
We headed back to town, grabbed a couple of (terrible) massages and boarded the next sleeper bus to take us the rest of the way to 4000 islands.

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