Vang Vieng to Vientiane

---

From our hostel in Luang Prabang we were taken to a kind of small car park which had a couple of mini buses in which would take us on to Vang Vieng, we had met a couple of girls the night before in the food market from New Zealand who were a part of a bigger group and they were all heading the same way as us and it just happened that we were on the same mini bus as them so it turned out to be a bit of a lively journey......until most of them got travel sick and it quitened down a bit but the drive from Luang Prabang was pretty good, there were many twists and turns as we made our way along the mostly bumpy dirt tracks through the mountains but the views made up for this and after stopping off halfway at a small roadside restaurant we were at our next destination in no time!



Vang Vieng is only a small town about 3 hours’ drive from Luang Prabang, which had become a well-known name spoken amongst backpackers for tubing, but over the last couple of years this has slowly been shut down as it was seen as too dangerous as so many people had died from getting drunk and spending a day floating down a river, so now there’s only a small section open. This is still pretty much one of the only main things to do in Vang Vieng, and we didn't actually do it over the few days we were there! We decided to just chill out and laze around for a couple of days in some of the bakery’s and bars (loads of them playing the whole series of Friends back to back on a daily basis). The time has now just come into the high season but the small town was still pretty much very quiet with the hordes of tourists still not arrived and we ended up staying in a dorm, and being the only ones in it so we ended up with our own room again at a very cheap price (Just over £2 a night) and the room had some amazing views of the nearby mountains with hot air balloons slowly moving across in front of them as the sun goes down, so it's still working out in our favor with the accommodation at the moment, not that it's not nice to share dorms with people and meet others, but sometimes it's nice to have your own space, especially after months of constantly having people trying to sell you things or taxi drivers trying to pick up fares, so it's nice to shut the world out for a few days sometimes.



After a few lazy days we decided to move onto our next destination which was the capital, Vientiane, which again hasn't got a massive amount to do but we had to go here eventually as we needed to apply for visas to gain entry into Vietnam before we had actually left Laos, and we had heard that the Vietnamese Embassy was one of the best ones around, and it definitely seemed to be as we only spent around 10 minutes filling in forms (if that) and then had our visas ready to be picked up from the same place 24 hours later, so it ended up being a lot easier to get them than we had originally thought.



Again while in Vientiane we found another very cheap hostel in the heart of the city (Sihome Backpackers Hostel) a new place which is run by and Australian and a South African guy, so needless to say we had some really good food from the BBQs they put on in the evening just in front of the hostel itself. With there not being too much to do here we still got bicycles out for a day when we were applying for our visas and cycled around the city, it's ok Jade didn't fall off this time, but she did come out of the embassy at one point to find a small lad of about 5 years old peeing up against her bike, with what looked like his mum egging him on and trying to get him to do it quicker! That's one thing we've noticed here in Asia, when they need to go they go! It doesn't matter where they are or who's watching they will happily stop in the street and let loose right in front of you, so that kind of keeps you on your toes a bit!



Like i said there's not many sights to see in Vientiane, well apart from their own version of the Arc De Triomph which looks pretty impressive from a distance but it's not really all that once you get up close, so once we had our Vietnam visas sorted out we were then planning our journey into Vietnam itself and where we would go to first. With our short visit in Laos now almost over we were glad we came, even if we didn't do too much, but all the same we were glad we got to see another country, which is also currently building a main railway line which will connect it directly to China and that opens next year, so i'm sure the country that we have seen will soon disappear and the next time we pass through it will probably be completely different and modernized, so it will be interesting to see what the future holds for Laos! So anyway on our last morning we decided to get a Tuk Tuk to the main airport to see if we could get a last minute flight to Hanoi!

---