Vientiane is small for a capital city, and really lacks any defining soul as Luang Prabang has. Natacha from Switzerland was flying out that night, so we had arranged for her to leave her bags in our room, and the three of us headed out together.
Firstly we headed towards the Mekong River. Across from the river is Thailand, and we certainly expected something a bit more impressive. Between us and the river was a bit of a wasteland, not the lovely bank with gardens I was expecting in a capital city. We walked along the pathway to a rather impressive statue, then turned and headed to the Day Market. Its main redeeming feature is that it is air conditioned, otherwise it was mostly full of the usual Chinese manufactured items. Oh well.
Pathway with river wasteland to the right.
Impressive statue - we never did find out who he was
From here we did the fairly long walk to the most impressive attration in Vientiane, the Phat Luang Stupa. This dates back to 1566, and there is also a beautiful large temple and other buildings nearby. On the way we had passed a number of impressive looking Embassies, but overall there isn't a lot that is exciting, so it was an easy decision to catch a tuk tuk back to the hotel to freshen up before lunch.
The Stupa
With Natacha outside one of the temple buildings
Lunch was in a delightful bakery. There is an extremely strong French presence here, despite the fact they have been gone for a long time. Previous towns had signs in English as well as Lao, but here the alternative language is French.
Next stop was the National Museum. The first part was very interesting highlighting excavations that had unearthed signs of occupation back to 500,000 years. The later part of the museum was an interesting exercise in how a communist country portrays their history. Again, we had to leave our bags and cameras in lockers and take nothing in with us. The building was getting a little the worse for wear. There was only one room that had an airconditioner, coincidentally the room with the most propaganda.
We farewelled Natacha and left her to use our shower before her flight back to Switzerland, and headed out to find somewhere for dinner. I expected that like the other places in Laos, every second building would be somewhere to eat, but the few we found didn't appeal. Eventually we found ourselves back where we had eaten the night before. This was just a little more expensive, but the service was fantastic and the food good.
We had a tuk tuk organised for 9 am on Tuesday morning, and caught this with the mother and daughter from Sydney who were on the same flight as us, but catching onward flights in Bangkok. We flew Bangkok Air, which classifies themselves as a boutique airline. We were given lounge access with our ticket, and as we were at the airport quite early, this made the wait far more comfortable. Even though the flight was only an hour, they attempted to serve a meal, a bit difficult when we hit turbulence and they had to suspend the service. I hope the others in the back got theirs.
Flying into Bangkok the sky was quite black, and by the time we got out to a taxi it was pouring. We got to experience Bangkok traffic at its worse. Our taxi driver told us before heading off that with the rain we were probably looking at 1 -2 hours to get to the hotel. It took one and a quarter, and a great deal of that was stopped and not moving. I don't know how they put up with it the traffic jams. Poor taxi drivers.
The hotel we are staying at, for the third time now, is going to be closing next week. It has been bought by the Ibis group and will be closed for nearly two years for renovations. It is very well located and I'm sure will be missed over the next two years. The manager looked after us when we came back and upgraded us to a family room which is much bigger. He said the place was nearly empty. We asked about the staff and he said there were 160 workers and they all had to find other jobs.
I had thought that the rest of the afternoon by the pool was enticing, but the weather put a stop to that. Instead we just walked around the area going through all the market stalls.
I had booked two nights in Bangkok, partly to make the travel a bit easier, but also to allow time to see other sights. So as we are in the old part of the city, we headed to the new commercial area, the MBK shopping precinct. We caught a local bus which cost all of 7 baht each, even if we did have to stand the whole way. Once we got into the centre, it was pretty much, wow, look at the size of this place. A large part of it was the same sort of market stalls, but there were also a number of brand name shops as well. We crossed over to the other side which is the more upmarket area, and browsed around there for a while. Although the bus was the quickest and most direct, we decided the experience was more important, so caught the Sky Train to the river and then boarded a ferry back to the hotel. Pretty much a full day by the time we got back. We have had to adjust back to cars driving on the left again. Laos was on the right, which made for crossing the road a bit dangerous as we kept looking the wrong way.
Sky Rail above
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