Tales From a Female Traveller

Laos

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I don't have a wonderfully witty name for this entry as my head is full of a massive cold I picked up after the full moon party, but I thought I would take the time to finally put to the blog about our time in Laos. Due to my unscheduled bout of sickness the time we now had to go through Vietnam and Laos was running dangerously thin and we had to decide whether or not to ehad to Hanoi after Saigon, bypassing Laos altogether or just skip Hanoi and go to Laos. Then there was the problem of deciding where in Laos to go; Luang Prabang or Vientiene? In the end we decided to skip Hanoi and fly into Vientiene seeing as it was easier to get to Bangkok for B's flight home.
When we arrived in Vientiene we didn't have a passport photo for the visa and had to pay a rediculous amount so a rent-a-cop could plug in a photocopy machine and zeroz our passports. It's beyond me the way they can just rip people off without a second thought and sometimes yu cannot help but get the shits about the complete lack of structure to anything and everything. But when we finally got through visa control B was held up with strange questions from customs officials... very strange. After we made it through we were bailed into an old beat up Toyota Corona and herded off to our Guest House where for once, the Travel Bible did NOT let us down and we scored a pretty good twin bed room and settled in.
I actually liked Laos despite the hccups we faced (including one woman who tried to tell me my very legitimate american money was too old to be legal tendor... funny how in a country that is NOT america they consider the american dollar "legal tendor"... so I refused to take no for an answer and eventually she had to take it...) at the airport and in some shops and the flea infested restaurant we ate dinner at. It's the kind of place where the days cruise by and before you know it the sun is going down and it's time to eat dinner again. The people in Laos are quite polite and very warm and it was the first time we could rent a moto without having to have a driver, so the freedom we experienced in Laos was much greater than in Thailand or Cambodia. Farang (foreigners) aren't usually allowed to rent motos in such places due to the high number of accidents that occur each year from unexperienced and speed hungry people who lose control, crash and sometimes die on South East Asian roads, so when we discovered we were able to rent the moto in Laos we signed on. Thruthfully, in a place like Vientiene you don't need to go fast and more often than not you have to catch yourself from going under the speed limit rather than over it. So with a few practice runs around the block to get used to the gears and after ditching the helmets that would have caused more injury if we crashed than had we not been wearing them, we headed off to find the Buddha Park. At first we couldn't find it and turned around because we thought we had missed it somewhere alongt he line but when we stopped for the best ice cream I've had in my life the owner told us we had to keep going and that we'd eventually find it, so that we did.
The Buddha Park was apparently put togetherin the 1950's by a retired Monk. It's set right on the river side and features a bizzare cement turnip like structure which you can climb into and gawk at the hideous version of someone's idea of the underworld. (Buffy eat your heart out, I got my photo take IN the Hellmouth!!!) So seeing statues of a skeleton bashing a baby against the ground was not an uncommon sight here. When you climb through the tiny staired manholes and come out on top of the "Hell Turnip" yuo're rewarded with a birds eye view of the Buddha Park, a massove expanse of land filled with statues of every kind of Buddha you can imagine, from Buddha to Vishnu and a huge reclining Buddha that presents itself as the highlight of the park. It was such a change of scenery from the same old temples we were seeing throughout our travels...
We also visited a monument that is supposed to rememble the Victory Monument in France where you get a 360 degree view of Vientiene and refused to pay a 500 Baht entry fee into That Luang which looked brilliantly beautiful in the late afternoon sunlight reflecting off the gold paint it's covered in. I did however, do that time old tourist scam of paying to set free some birds for good luck, which was actually quite fun.
We also took a trip to the Morning Markets (which actually run all day) which was fun, except they're always muddy in some spots but its good to see the kinds of things they sell... everything from the same old tourist crap to herbal and traditional medicines.
All in Laos was nice and it's a shame we didn't have more time to explore some of the countryside but I am glad we chose Vientiene.

In other news... today (8/12/06) is the Queens Birthday in Thaiand.. Yay!

posted by Lucyspeak @ 8:08 pm