Vientiane

10th October 2006

We caught a bus from Vang Vieng to the capital city of Laos, Vientiane. As usual, it was sold to us as a “private mini bus’ exactly the same as the flash new one outside our booking office”. As usual, they lied. An old, racked off mini bus arrived to collect us, then we proceeded to drive around the streets of Vang Vieng for 45 minutes picking other people up. Clearly the concept of ‘private’ was not understood correctly.

We arrived in Vientiane at about 1pm and stayed at a place called Joes guest house. Accommodation here is about 3 x more expensive to the rest of Laos but nowhere near as nice. For a twin room, with shared bathroom it was $8 USD. Elsewhere is Laos it is $6 for twin with bathroom. Lizzie and Gill took a shared bathroom room. I paid the difference for Donna and I to have a private bathroom, as I couldn’t face it.

As dusk approached, we went for a jaunt around the town; checked out the local market; the shops and other points of interest. The buildings are crumbling but have a faint charm about them. The buildings are more European than Asia in style. However, it is the dirtiest city I have ever visited. We stayed overnight, got up early and have booked our bus ticket to Vietnam for that very afternoon.

Last night as we were trying to get to sleep, Donna and I were kept awake by some horrendous cat induced noises. It literally sounded like they were being skinned alive or torn apart, which I suppose is all too likely. It sounded as though they were screaming, rather than crying or fighting. Donna and I were quite distressed and it didn’t stop, it went on and on. We’d finally had enough so went to the bedroom window to see if we could identify where the noise was coming from. We heard a man’s voice. We shouted at him. The noise stopped. It was absolutely horrible. It sounded as though they were in a lot of pain. I have no idea what was going on and can’t even begin to imagine what he might have been doing to them, if he was just killing them it wouldn’t have lasted that long.

Last night we caught up with a guy called Karl, who had been travelling with the guys we met trekking and we briefly met after our calamitous Tubing day. He joined us on a visit to the local markets where we tried on all the ridiculous clothes for sale.

The market sells everything you can think of: fridges, hair straighteners, stationary, earrings, animal teeth, skulls, food sellers, real gold, fake gold, genuine oriental antiques, machetes, jade figurines, elephant tusks, mobile phones, hand-made clothes, ball gowns, meal worms… the list is endless. Nothing has a price on and when asked how much anything is, they say $10. As is standard with Asian haggling, after about 5 seconds they come back with $9. Next is “Special Price $7”.  It usually ends up at about $3 or $4 but you have to go through the whole charade or they feel like they’re being ripped off.

We found a lovely little place called ‘JoMa Bakery’ selling lovely home-made bread, pastries, sandwiches, lasagne and proper coffee for the girls. What a treat! It even had a proper toilet, with nice tiles and toilet roll and a hand dryer. The cutting edge of sophistication in Laos.

We leave Vientiane tonight for our 17 hour bus journey to Vietnam and should arrive in Vin, in central Vietnam, some time tomorrow. Karl will be joining us.

 

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