Laos: Please Don't Rush

Arrived in Vientiane yesterday evening after a very long boring and uncomfortable 11 hour bus ride. Our bus should have been in two hours previously but due to five breakdowns and heavy fog it was late late late. I hadn't booked anywhere to stay so i had to wander the streets looking for something. The tuk tuk drivers ominously told us that everywhere was full and we had a foreboding of homelessness but after wandering around for about 15 minutes i ended up at a hotel in the suite for about 33 usd a night. Expensive for Laos standards but sweet for me.

The day before i left luang pragbang it rained like i haven't seen is SEA since i was in Hoi An in Vietnam in the middle of November. It just poured. As a result my knee hurt. As a result of that i felt cranky especially since i hadn't any pain killers with me strong enough to deal with my knee pain if it gets bad. So i tried to sleep and watched some TV, and didn't do anything much. I was annoyed because the night before i had meet up with a group of people who were on my boat and we had a lovely evening, only interrupted by my discovery of a dead rat with it's guts hanging out in the toilet of the restaurant. Hmm i took a photo but for the sake of decency I'm not posting it. We tentatively arranged to meet the following night under the impression that we would just bump into each other but it was so miserable me for one didn't bump into anyone.

The bus journey to Vientiane was long and arduous, but somehow didn't wind me up as much as trying to take the 67a from Aston Quay to Celbridge in rush hour traffic. The road was incredibly windy we just went from one mountain peak to another through narrow windy roads, at least three times the bus almost crashed into on coming traffic. Beside me on the bus was a Laotian man and his daughter, she was little about five and he was cradling her in his arms. I think she had motion sickness and she started vomiting, he was so attentive and she was so good. It didn't make my journey any more comfortable but i felt for him. We went through some of the most amazing scenary i have ever had the privledge to see, and some of the most grinding poverty, villages where there was no electricty where the people lived in mud huts with bamboo walls, the children playing on the sides of the road, i had to think to myself do they go to school? It looked harsh yesterday i couldn't imagine what it would be like if it was the rainy season. I didn't take any photos because this isn't a poverty theme park with a 25$ entrance fee, like many people seem to think it is.

Vientiane is unfairly called the biggest village in South East Asia. It's not. It's a nice small city. Not a pretty city but being from Dublin l appreciate not so pretty cities. It's also one of the Frenchest places i have been to on this journey outside of Paris. It had a faux Arc de triomphe and a faux Champs Elysees all the streets are called rue this and blvd that or avenue this or rue the other. It's strange. Maybe it there was a little laostown in Paris this is what it would look like because the smell, the lack of noise and the Buddhist monks walking around remind you that this isn't Paris at all.

The other weird thing about here, and in here i mean Laos is that the demographics of the tourist has changed. Gone in general are the twenty something backpackers and they have been replaced by travellers in their thirties and forties and upwards. It's a strange change and I'm not really sure why, maybe the place is so out of the way, maybe I'm not where all the pot smokers are, and there's a lot of pot here, on the bus you could see wild cannabis plants just there on the side of the road, but whatever it is it seems just that little but off the beaten track to attract the Koh San road crew.