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Published: March 20th 2006
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The Mighty Mekong?
It ain't so mighty in the dry season. Water levels are incredibly low this year, probably because the Chinese are damming the river farther north. Thailand is just across the river and you could probably wade there because the water is so shallow. We liked Laos immediately. It was great to arrive in Vientiane, a laidback, rather small capital city that is warmer than Lijiang, which was having unusually cold and rainy weather during our visit.
Our first impression of Laos is how laidback it is. After our plane landed at the Vientiane airport, we noticed people walking across the airport and some locals were even sitting on the runway fixing a motorbike. You would never see something like that in the paranoid US.
Vientiane reminded us a lot of Phnom Penh, with its colonial buildings and a similar layout on the riverfront. However, Laos feels more French than Cambodia, probably because the Khmer Rouge killed French speakers and anyone leftover from the French colonial era. There are a lot more French restaurants, much to our delight. The first thing we did in Vientiane was stuff ourselves on French food. Sure, we could have found a cheaper place for lunch, but it not often that you get a first-class three-course lunch at an excellent French restaurant for US$5.
The other thing that struck us about Laos was how in almost two weeks there, not once did we see any uniformed police
officers except in the airports. Even when we saw a traffic accident in Vientiane, with a tuk tuk and an overturned motorbike, there were no police anywhere in sight. However, since Laos is still a communist country, just because we didn't see them, doesn't mean that there weren't any police around.
In Vientiane, we visited the National Museum, where they have some interesting tribal costumes and displays about the Pathet Lao denouncing the US imperialists and French puppets. We also looked around the market and wandered around the riverfront area. At night, the locals set up food stalls and tables, so everyone hangs out at the river eating and drinking. Vientiane is not really a big city for sightseeing, but it's a great place to hang out for a couple of days eating great cheap French food.
We were also privileged enough to have satellite TV in our hotel room in Vientiane, where we enjoyed watching Florida State beat Duke at basketball. Go Noles! We also saw a really cheesy movie called "Frankenfish," which is about a giant mutant snakehead that hunts people down in the Louisiana swamps. Why was this film denied a special effects Oscar? Not
to spoil the ending, but if you missed this classic, there will most definitely be a "Frankenfish 2."
We went to Vang Vieng for a couple of days. This place is a small riverside village known as a backpacker's mecca. Food and accomodation are so cheap that you could comfortably get by on $10 a day or less. We went on a kayaking trip down the river and got to see a couple of neat caves. We had to squeeze through a tiny opening to get out of one, and I was afraid that one of us might get stuck. The locals carry boards through these caves for constructing houses. This is an onerous task, but it is somehow easier to carry these materials through these slippery caves than to drag them around the mountains.
We also spent a few days hanging out in Luang Prabang. This place is famous for its wats, but we are pretty watted out at this point, so we didn't visit too many of them. The most interesting was a wat that supposedly has a Buddha footprint and which is located on top of a hill with a fantastic view of the city.
Locals playing
This game is a combination of soccer and volleyball. You have to get the ball over the net without using your hands. The city is very laidback, so we enjoyed walking around the riverfront and wandering the streets. We also liked the night market that pops up in the middle of the main street every single night. There are mostly motorbikes and not so many cars in Laos, so blocking off the street for hours doesn't create too much chaos in Laos, like it would in Thailand, where there are many more cars.
We did a half day trip to the Tat Kuang Si waterfall. This was a really beautiful place set in the forest, with lots of exotic flowers and clear old water that we swam in. The water was very refreshing on a hot day and it was a lot of fun to spend time there. I also climbed to the top to see the source of the falls. We stopped in a "minority village" on the way back, which wasn't too exciting.
We also took an incredibly slow boat to the Pak Ou caves. There are hundreds of Buddha statues inside the caves, which was neat to see. We also got to see villages where they make paper, lao lao (local firewater), and other products. The most
interesting thing was watching the villagers weave. The boat trip was very scenic, with lots of fisherman and nice views. It really gives you an idea about how sparsely populated Laos is. Whole stretches of river were completely free of local villages and people. Thailand and Cambodia are not like this at all. River land offers abundant fishing and agriculture opportunities, so there are many people living on the river in these countries.
In Cambodia, we got used to transactions in two different currencies: USD and riels. In Laos, transactions were sometimes in three currencies: US dollars, Thai baht and Lao kip. This was sometimes confusing, especially if baht were involved, because every place seemed to have their own exchange rate and baht often got a poor exchange rate. Kip are definitely the best currency to use, because the official rate is 10,400 kip to US$1, and the rate on the streets was normally $10,000 kip to US$1. The largest bill is 20,000 kip (about $2), so carrying $10 or $20 meant having big wads of kip in our pockets.
We noticed a slight shortchanging problem in Laos. Sometimes I think it was due to poor math and
confusion over a transaction in several different currencies, but tuk tuk drivers and Internet cafes seem to be notorious for shortchanging. There were several occasions when tuk tuk drivers tried to change the fare after we arrived at our destination or overcharge us for extra stops that they insisted on making to guesthouses that pay them commissions. We just gave them the correct fare and walked away, and there were no problems. Also, several people at Internet places seemed to think that we did not check how much time we spent on the computer, but when we demonstrated that we knew what time we logged on, they quickly changed the total to the correct amount.
This was a minor annoyance and did not cause any major headaches. All in all, we really liked laidback Laos. The people are very friendly and smile a lot, and there are a lot of beautiful places to see.
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Charlie
non-member comment
Frankenfish
Being from Louisiana, I can attest that Frankenfish is real. Those are not special effects.