Vientiane

The bus ride from Vang Vieng to Vientiane, the Laotian capitol, was mercifully short and the roads relatively straight.  We arrived to hot weather and incredibly high humidity, heralding imminent rainshowers.  

More than 100 years ago, Vientiane was the center of French Indochina.  So there are still some French names on buildings, a high incidence of French bakeries and cafes, and a few more French tourists than average.

When it started raining, we broke out the umbrellas and walked up to the Patuxai monument.  It's an Arc De Triomphe-style arch in front of the main government buildings, apparently made with concrete originally donated by the US to build an airport runway.

(While we're talking about government buildings, some Laotian history: Laos was involved in the Vietnam war, and has a communist government.  It is where the real rogue CIA special operative lived that the Apocalypse Now character Colonel Kurtz is based on (played by Marlon Brando).  Laos also underwent the most extensive per capita bombing in world history.  During 1964-1973, the US dropped two million tonnes of bombs on the country, in 580,000 air missions.  That's one bombing mission every 8 minutes, 24 hours per day, for 9 years.  As a result, there is a huge problem with unexploded bombs - 25% of the villages in the country are contaminated by them.  For example, 270 million cluster bomblets were dropped, and 30% didn't explode immediately.  Since the end of the war, 20,000 people have died from these unexploded bombs.  Some non-governmental organizations are helping to clear these, but by some estimates even clearing at the present rate won't make the country safe for another 100 years.  So you can't just go for a walk in the bush here.)

The interior of the huge arch contains several tourist shops.

The roof has temple-like architecture, and more shops.

View from the top.

The presidential palace is at the end of this street, in the distance.

 
We dropped by a very well-executed western-style coffee shop (Joma), and wonder of wonders they had Nanaimo Bars!  The name was even spelled correctly (I'm looking at you, New Zealand...) They were very tasty (all coconut, no walnuts).

Nice temples everywhere you turn in town.

The ceiling of the temple's porch.  Wow.

Many temples have a tower housing their ceremonial drum(s).  This was the grandest one we had seen to date.

Another coffee break, and we stopped by Makphet, a very successful place whose mission is to train street youth to work in the hospitality industry.  A nice restaurant with great-looking food, but we only stopped for a drink.  The kids were really on the ball and really nice.

Sarah had a lime soda.

I, however, had their specialty drink - a blended drink made of Thai coffee and coconut ice cream (and probably huge quantities of condensed milk, etc).  It was amazing, but definitely should have been shared.  Think of an intensely coffee-flavoured, thick, milkshake-like frappucino, but about 3 times as rich and flavourful.  I'm still full from it.

Monk laundry across the street.

Bikes across the street.  Vientiane is a bite-sized capital of only a few hundred thousand people, with scooters the main method of transportation, same as all southeast Asia.  The official state-censored newspaper stated that, for the week of Feb 18-24 this year, there were 40 traffic accidents in the city, involving 71 vehicles.  These caused 7 deaths and almost 20 serious injuries!  While we've rarely seen accidents so far and traffic seems to flow pretty well, it sounds like the lack of safety standards & helmets, non-existence of traffic rules and (reportedly) significant prevalence of drinking & driving result in accidents with serious consequences.

Presidential palace.

And across the street from the palace is the Wat Si Saket temple.  It is the only 19th-century temple in Vientiane to have survived invasions and attacks intact (all others were destroyed).

It's also well-known because it contains more than 10,000 Buddha statues in the central temple area - most of them small statues in niches in the walls.

Extra-happy Buddha.

Buddha storage room containing statues salvaged from the rubble caused by the war.

We did a little more wandering - and dropped by a great bookstore with reasonable prices and the world's nicest bookstore owner.  If you're in Vientiane, you should visit the Kosila Bookshop, on a side street across from the National Cultural Centre.  If you buy something, he'll give you candies!  Great selection of Asian travel guides.

Vientiane sits along the famous Mekong River.  The waterfront is being redeveloped, with big flood-proof berms, parks and playgrounds, and huge casino-like complexes not far away.  Over the big sandbar in front of the downtown core, and across the river, is Thailand.

A day of rain and a half day of cloud and - the temperature is in the low 20s!  A nice break from the sweltering humidity we'd experienced to this point.  Made for a pleasant walk along the riverbank.

We caught a shuttle (converted pickup truck) to the train station outside of town, where got on a shuttle train over the Mekong to Thailand.  There, we transferred to our air conditioned 2nd class sleeper train on an overnight trip to Bangkok.  Sweet.

But unlike Sarah's private, 4-person 2nd class berth she had on her train in China, this one, well, seemed to be a regular train car with a hallway running through it.  Oh-oh.

But after a while a nice train employee came by and unfolded the seats into beds - one upper and one lower, all with sheets, pillows, light blanket, curtains and reading light.  Not so bad, especially since everyone seemed to hit the sack almost immediately.

I think Sarah liked her little nook off the train hallway.  The railroad was a bit rough (and the cars a bit noisy) to get a ton of sleep.  And it's a good thing I'm under 6 feet tall or I wouldn't have fit the bed.  But it was clearly a whole other world of comfort when compared to an overnight bus ride.