Vientiane

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The French, in my opinion, really messed up the spelling of these Laos city names with their annoying phonics. In fact, they even messed up the spelling of the country itself as the “s”, in French, is silent. Thus, it took me the duration of our stay in Vientiane to finally almost learn how to pronounce it – more like “Viang Chang” or maybe “Wien Chan”. I’m not sure exactly, but either of those is a much closer transliteration than is “Vientiane”.



We made it to Vientiane on a night bus with beds on the floor that slept two, without any dividers. A Dutch woman we’d met waiting several hours for the bus in Pakse was forced to share her bed with a Laos man she did not know, and I’m fairly certain they did not get to know each other. At the very least, she did not comment on the situation when we’d arrived early in the morning and went straight to breakfast at a ubiquitous French bakery before hitting the sites.



Vientiane became the capital of Laos in the mid 16^th century and was also the capital of the French protectorate till it fell to the Japanese during WWII. In 1975, the Communist Party took over the capital and the country, ending a prolonged civil war. With about 750,000 inhabitants, it sleepily sits along the Mekong River, though there were signs of future development as we walked the streets to the Putaxai, or the Victory Gate, or the sardonically nicknamed “Vertical Runway”.



The funds for the Putaxai were donated from the US, but were originally designated for an airport. Once the funds were received, the city government interestingly allocated them to the building of the Putaxai. It was grand in stature, purposely taller than the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, with apparent Buddhist motifs.



We then headed to the Pha That Luang temple. Blindingly golden and built in the 16^th century to house one of the infinite number of collarbones of the Buddha (practically everywhere we went on the whole continent, there was something housing the collarbone of the Buddha), it was destroyed by the Siamese in the late 19^th century, then rebuilt by the French in the 1930s.



Not far was Wat Si Saket, the oldest temple in Vientiane. It was built in 1818 but survived the Siamese raids later in the 19^th century. It was built in the Thai style and, as expected, includes hundreds of various images of the Buddha.



We spent the rest of the day strolling around town, visiting a couple other temples along the way, and securing our visas to Vietnam. Not able to wait till Vietnam, we had a bowl of Pho before we walked a concrete path along the Mekong River, with pretty views of the river and lined with young couples holding hands.

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