July 18th, 2012
Made it to Vientiene
So our day started out great…took a picture of the bears before we got all packed up for our bus trip to Vientiene.
They enjoyed their time at the Elephant Crossing…but probably won’t be back….since I am not sure that I will be coming back ; )
We had scheduled our tuk tuk pick up for the VIP bus to be 9:30am with an anticipated departure of 10:00am for the actual bus. We said good bye to our new friends, the Hairs, and headed off. The tuk tuk had 11 people in it by the time it was deemed full…pretty impressive!
Photo a little foggy as the camera had just come out of air con room and they take a while to unfog…
What we did notice was that the crowd leaving Vang Vieng is a lot rougher around the edges, shall we say, than the crowd coming into Vang Vieng. Every single one of these young folks looked half dead, sleep deprived and seriously hung over. Very somber crown the entire way…this lot ended up looking just like every other passenger on the bus (except for us chipper older folk who went to bed at sensible time the night before : ))))
Here is our obligatory bus shot!
The good news is….the bus only left 20 minutes late….and it took exactly 2 hours and 59 minutes….so we got into the Vientiene bus depot at 1:19pm! Grabbed a tuk tuk people mover to city center for 40,000 kip and we were on our way to the next pit stop of our amazing race : )
The challenge then became…..how to find our hotel bcz the shuttle thing we took just dropped us off at “city center” between a map on a post, a map in another traveler’s lonely planet Laos book and our recollections of what Ian had told us (and oh yeah….one quick stop into a Thai airways storefront) we found our hotel and got checked in.
By 2:30 we were on our way out the door to look for a quick snack and high hopes of finding some cool stuff to look at. We did indeed do just that.we walked down to the Mekong River and the was a Park with this big statue…no idea what it is though…
In a bakery we saw this little goodie….Could hardly believe it! The Canadians will recognize this!
I did not actually have one bcz they were also offering mangos crumb pie….which sounded like something I could not make at home….so i went with that option!
The is also an Arc de Triomphe replica built here…so we went to see that. You can climb up inside and get a very nice view of the city….
We also tried to be law abiding tourists and follow the rules on the signs….but it was hard bcz there was grass all over the place and it was hard not to pass it.
Here’s me in the guard shack outside the presidential palace…
Anyway…
On the way back we might have gotten a teeny bit lost….but it is funny now as we are all tucked safely in our room…but at the time, my feet were getting a little sore and I was getting hungry….we stopped and asked a few times for directions….but the English here is not so good…so were basically on our own. When we got back into tourist area, we asked a tuk tuk driver (he didn’t really want to tell us–he wanted to charge 50,000 kip to drive us) but Troy sweet talked him and he gave us some hand gestures for directions…
So kinda glad we are only here for one night as we fly to Bangkok tomorrow afternoon to get ready for the long flight home early Saturday morning…
This town is not huge by any stretch of the imagination, population around 250,000 despite being the capital of Laos….but it is far bigger than the last 2 towns we were in and it just doesn’t ring my bell…
