Buddah Park in Laos

Asia » Laos » West » Vientiane
February 24th 2007

Published: February 27th 2007

Edit Blog Post

Marie d

Light as a feather

Laos, or in other words: country #8, if you don't include our quick visits to Japan and Myanmar, is the most layed back capital city in the world. Just a fun fact I thought you might like to know. It's a beautiful city away from the beaches. A definite change for Jason and I, which we extremely enjoyed and tried to soak up in the few days we had there.

Where do I start. Laos was definitely one of our favorite countries in Southeast Asia. It had the whole package; a warm climate, mountainous range, friendly locals, AMAZING FOOD, refreshing beer, souvenaire-packed markets, and ridiculous joint-achingly fun tubing (if thats a proper adverb to describe it).

Jason and I planned ahead to store our huge rucksacks in our gusethouse in Bangkok while travelling through out Laos. We each bought 30L backpacks which - let me tell you - were a relief to have on our backs and prevented us from just settling for the first guesthouse whether it be a hole or not.

The guesthouse we stayed at in Vientiane was actually a 4 person dorm, but much nicer than most of the accomodation we've experienced in SE

What!!!

Jason was meant to be helping me out of the croc's jaws. So rude

Asia. It was spottless, equiped with air-con, hot showers, comfy-as beds, AND only costed 30,000 kip or roughly $3 US/night. Our favorite restaurants were just a block from our guesthouse and the servers pretty much expected to see us after a while of apparant patriotism to their venues.

Our first plan for the beautiful capital of Laos was to spend a day touring the city. We accomploished just that with the help of one very anxious tuk-tuk driver named Lon. I guess we also gave some of the other tourists a break from his annoying urge to offer you places to go in HIS tuk-tuk.

The first place we visited was the majestic Buddha Park located along side the Mekong River. This, as you can see in all our photos, was a huge grassy area with heaps of ancient buddhist and muslim figurines. We definitely had some fun utilizing the statues as our props for our collection of smart-ass photos. We saw one of the largest reclining buddha statues, which was quite impressive. We even ducked into some pretty tiny cave entrances to see numerous artifacts.

Next was our trip to Pataxai, which having seen the actual

Kiss me my darling

Arc du Triumph in Paris was "meh", I guess I'd give them an E for Effort. Our final site was That Luang, the big golden temple in the pictures. Very nice, but after seeing hundreds of temples through out all of SE Asia, they all start to look the same.

After our exausting day, we decided to head out for drinks at the local pub. It was Happy Hour..big surprise there. It always seems to be Happy Hour in Asia. We got 2 jugs of BeerLao for approx. $1.80 US. The next morning we left for Vangvien. We both had pretty bad headaches. It would be a nice relaxing day of rest, to prepare us for tubing the next day!

Additional photos below

Photos: 19, Displayed: 19