Vientiane - Capital City (Quick Update)

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Well I have now travelled down from Vang Viang to a place called Tha Khaek...6 hours south of Vientiane, Laos' capital city. I spent two nights in Vientiane and it is the most understated capital city you could imagine. It is no more built up than a leafy suburb of south county Dublin and from what I could see it has no sense of a city about it at all. Think of a small rural town in the west of Ireland and you begin to get the pace of life around this place. The fastest thing about it was the Mekong river which flows through the city.

It did however prove finalcially beneficial for my good self (yes I know...self praise is no praise but its all I got when travelling alone!) as I was still carrying around those half eaten dollar bills that a mouse ravaged through while I was in the forests of southern Thailand. Ever sense that incident I had tried to get them changed in almost ever town I landed in, but always to no avail. All I ever got in response to my attempts was "capital city....capital city!" And sense I wasn't back in Bangkok after that this was the first chance I got in "a capital city" to give it a go. I must have went into 5 different banks before I was finally directed to Lao commercial bank where after a lot of humming and hawing on their part and a lot of "but these are good notes...they are just damaged" and "surely the COMMERCIAL bank has to take responsibility for damaged currency or are you telling me I need to travel to America before I can change these" from me they finally secummed to my nagging and chaged my dollars into a whopping half a million kip! Thats 40 euro by the way...they made sure in giving me the worst possible exchage rate! But alas I have now got rid of them and they ended up part-paying for the motorbike rental during the next part of my journey. Enter 'Tha Khaek'!...

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