Advertisement
Published: January 18th 2010
Edit Blog Post
First, the trip. It was a little long. I left home around ten AM Sunday and arrived in Vientiane, the capital of Laos at eleven AM the following Saturday. But those six days weren’t all travel time. I made a stop in St. Louis to visit my friend Jocelyn for three days. And then I continued on to LA, spending an anxious night first in Denver due to a mechanical failure, thankfully arriving for my flight from LA to Bangkok with three hours to spare. The hour-and-a half line to check in to China Airlines was probably the longest line I’ve ever waited in. The first twenty minutes there was nearly no way to be sure I was in the right line, as the giant hall was packed, body to body, with people in line for China Airlines or Security. After checking in, the wait to drop my checked bag off in a different security line was about thirty minutes. Fortunately, I still arrived at the massive gate 45 minutes before departure, which, since there were about 1000 passengers, took about 45 minutes.
The plane had two levels, the top level spaciously reserved for the lucky first-class travelers. The rest
of us suckers were stuck in a tight room of 800, for fourteen hours, and fed only two meals. Two meals! The plane also smelled strongly of sewage for the last five hours. Luckily, I was able to sleep about half the time, and we arrived in Taipei, Taiwan for a two hour layover around 8 PM Friday night. There I met many nice Americans traveling to Bangkok for pleasure trips before boarding the brief three hour flight to Bangkok.
Arriving around 1 AM Saturday in Bangkok, I had a little time to spend before my next flight departed for Laos, at 9:40 AM. Fortunately, Bangkok is a hub stopover for international travelers, and there were hundreds of others roaming the airport all night, so all the shops and restaurants were open and all the lights were on. I’d slept a lot on the plane so I managed to stay awake all night, not really wanting to fall asleep in an airport with my valuables on me. I wrote a bit, walked around, talked to other travelers, drank tea at a coffee shop. The time actually passed fairly quickly, which was a pleasant surprise. Ella, a darling 4-year old
girl I met at the coffee shop, traveling from California to Luang Prabang, Laos with her mom, summed up the feeling this kind of extended travel created.
“Is it nighttime still?” she asked
“No, it’s light outside, see?” I answered
“Oh, I thought it was still nighttime. I didn‘t know it was day again.” I could relate. Time felt a little more fluid than normal.
When it was time for my flight, I felt blessed, as looking around the airport, I got the feeling some people were laid over there for a lot more than 8 hours. A group of about thirty very-poor looking guys in their twenties, possibly from India or Pakistan, slept in chairs along a wall across from where I checked in. They looked like they’d been there for days and were bored and dirty.
After a short one hour flight on a thirty-seat plane to Vientiane, the capital of Laos, my friend Bart picked me up at the airport. I said goodbye to the many exhausted friends I’d met on the plane. (Most of them were Lao who lived in America, coming back to visit family. One guy hadn’t been back
to see his mom in thirty-two years.)
Boy, did it feel good to finally be somewhere. Driving through the streets I was immediately struck by the vibrancy of the colors, the amount of life in the streets, the strange and interesting activities to observe at every corner.
I spent four days in the capital, getting reacquainted with Lao-style life, seeing my old friends, and meeting new friends. Incredibly, I wasn’t really jet-lagged and managed to stay awake that entire first day. (All in all, the journey had taken about fifty hours.)
In Vientiane I met Da, a lovely young woman who I started corresponding with after she commented upon my blog, and she became a great new friend. She took me for raw pig skin salad, something I’d never tried before during my previous time in Laos. It was a bit like a cold vermicelli salad, with some hard bits. She also brought me to a massive club, bigger than anything I’ve been to in the US or Canada or Australia, with twelve pillars holding up a twenty-foot ceiling, spaced throughout the hundred tables on the dance floor. Thirty waiters stood by, ready to be called over
if you needed anything.
I visited the National Museum, housing a collection of Lao historical pieces, dating from 5,000 BC to 1988. The museum is in a grand but crumbling building, dating, as many of the buildings here do, from buildings created by the French, during colonisation, fifty to one hundred years ago. Incredible, five-foot tall engraved urns, dating to before Christ, sit upon raised platforms, easily touchable to anyone. A large section of the museum is composed of peeling and fading photographs, from before and after the Vietnam/Lao War. Some captions read, “the Americans and their puppets massacring Lao citizens.” There are also about a hundred weapons in open displays, guns, and knives, used by both sides during the war. The building is not air-conditioned, the paint is peeling from the walls, and many priceless artifacts sit out in the open air. There are security guards, but I don’t think they are actually doing “security”. It’s a very different experience than an American museum that would house the same sort of artifacts. Excavations of ancient artifacts are stop-and-go in the country, as foreign expeditions come and go with money and tools. Dinosaur bones were recently found in Laos.
I’ll let the photos tell the rest of the story, as I’m sure many of you are very curious about what this place actually looks like. Vientiane is definitely one of the more relaxed capitals in the world, though I’m sure there are many capitals even more run-down. Most of the buildings date back to the French colonial building, so they are very beautiful, though about ¾ are in disrepair, with maybe ¼ gorgeously restored.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.053s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 8; qc: 24; dbt: 0.0302s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
fred appel
non-member comment
GREAT!!!!!!!!
Britt great to see you safely arrived.Loved these photos. Write me soon, Love Uncle Freddy.