Vientiane
We wanted to head to Hanoi and North Vietnam as our next destination. Geographically, logically and timing wise it would make sense to head from Luang Prabang (northern Laos) strait across to Hanoi. Just one problem – there is no way to do it. Actually that is not true. There is a bus that backpackers refer to as “The Bus from Hell” due to its 24-30 hour duration on awful roads with the passenger section packed to the ceiling with people, luggage, rice sacks and sometimes livestock. The other option is to fly Laos Airlines' old turbo-prop planes over the mountains for an obscene amount of money. Even if I could have convinced Danna to fly on that plane (not likely) or convinced her to take enough pills that she would never remember flying on that plane the flights were sold out for the next few days anyway. So after swearing never to take another 12 hour bus ride after the last one – we hopped on a 12 hour bus to the capital in order to catch a Vietnam Airlines flight direct to Hanoi.
Honestly, there is nothing really fun to do in Vientiane. It is a decent size city and we walked around down by the river saw some crazy stage performance that was really bad (there was like 150 chairs set up and like 8 people watching the show). We were just buying our time until our flight took off 36 hours later. We went shopping in a market and a mall but after Luang Prabang this couldn't compare. So when all else fails in SE Asia there is always a temple you can go see. So we went to Phrathat Luang, the National Monument which encompasses a huge golden Stuppa and is surrounded by large beautiful temples. The monument is the most important sight in Laos and is featured on the currency and the National seal. It was quite impressive and very gold.
The crazy thing about our stay in Vientiane was the amount of mosquitoes we had in our hotel room. We were staying in a really decent place but the bugs just kept coming. I literally killed like 75 in our two days there. I have to say that I have gotten really good at catching them and had some great kills – jump kills when they flew high, diving kills as they flew low over the bed, one handed snatch kills when I only had a split second to react and my personal favorite was using the wall to sandwich the buggers leaving a fossil like carcass still on the wall. Over the two day span, that was the most fun I had in town.
We are really looking forward to Vietnam and plan on taking our time there working our way down the dragon shaped country from North to South.
