Laos - Vientiane

We took a flight from Ho Chi Minh City to Vientiane, the capital of Laos, and after a brief stop-over in Phnom Penh arrived within a few hours of leaving HCMC.

You can get a visa-on-arrival at Vientiane airport but the price varies depending on the country you’re from.
Myanmar citizens get a free 14-day visa on arrival, but somehow my jammy fiancé managed to get a full month without paying the $30 to do so!
I however, with my British passport, had to pay $35!

When you arrive at the immigration desks there are collections of forms to fill in beforehand – one being your arrival/departure card that you should have been given on the flight to Laos, the other is the visa-on-arrival application form that takes all of 2-3 minutes to fill in.
Now because I live and travel in Asia, I always have recent passport photos in my purse/passport holder which is useful for times like these when you need a passport photo (in colour) – don’t worry too much if you don’t have one, you just have to pay an extra $1 for them to scan and copy your passport photo onto the visa application.

For more information on the Laos visa-on-arrival and the costs, please use the following link: www.laos-guide-999.com/laos-visa-on-arrival.html

We arrived at the airport around 7pm and by the time we’d gone through immigration and collected our bags the SIM card place was closed, but luckily, I managed to change $200 at the open currency exchange desk, which gave me about 1,665,000 KIP.

Having just been in Vietnam where they also have large money denominations, I forgot that $200 gives you about 4,500,000 VND and Laos is more expensive than I’d realised and hoped for!

Another important thing to remember about Laos, particularly Laos airport is there is no meter-taxi service from the airport, but rather a fixed rate of 57,000 Laos KIP ($7/£5) to basically anywhere in the town of Vientiane.

I discovered this after being stubborn for about 30 minutes and refusing to take this information at face-value but rather wait it out and see if a meter-taxi would magically appear.

Eventually, realising that unlike some other places throughout Asia, these people were in fact not trying to rip us off, we paid the 57,000 KIP and were quickly on our way.

As an added bonus, the guy at the small desk before you exit the airport (where you pay for the taxi) advised me to not carry around a lot of money in my purse as when I pay for something there may be some opportunists looking to see how much money I have to try and steal it from me later.
Advice worth heeding throughout your own Asian adventures.

We arrived at our accommodation, Ali Backpackers Hotel, and checked in as I watched nearly 1/3 of my money that I’d just exchanged disappear into the friendly man’s hands (406,000 Kip ($49/£37 for 4 nights! That was one of the cheapest accommodation offers we could find, bearing in mind that we were in a private double room with shared bathroom as opposed to a dorm room which would be cheaper plus breakfast was included in that price).

With this in mind, using sites like www.agoda.com / www.agoda.co.uk and paying for your accommodation online saves huge chunks of cash leaving your purse or wallet at once!

What we were not ready for was 4 flights of stairs (no lift/elevator) to get to our room.

As we’re planning on moving to Singapore after this travelling adventure, we have rather large, cumbersome and heavy suitcases, so carrying 30+ kg up those stairs was beyond tiring and not advisable!

The accommodation however was in a good location and we could see Thailand (I believe the north of Chiang Rai) just across the river!

The beds in Laos follow the Asian pattern of being harder than a bag of rocks but the beds in this hotel took it one step further - I genuinely had to check there was even a mattress on the bed because of the firmness.
Add that to the teeny, tiny blanket we were given and the whole sleeping situation wasn’t ideal.
On the plus side though, we did have an excellent AC unit which was desperately needed given that the temperatures outside were constantly exceeding 30®C (85®F) with humidity levels well above 70%.

We got some food in the hotel (about 30,000 KIP - $3.60/£2.70 for a burger!) and hit the hay.

The following day we decided to try and save some money on tuk tuks and motorbike rentals by walking to some ‘nearby’ sites.

First was Wat Si Saket (just over 2km from the hostel by walking along the river) and second was the Patuxai Monument a further 2-3km from there and then 6km back to the hotel after that!

Wat Si Saket is beautiful with lots of Buddha statues around the outside of the courtyard housing a large, inner temple in the middle.

Entrance was 3,000 KIP ($.035/$0.25) for locals and 10,000 KIP ($1.20/£0.90) for foreigners which doesn’t sound like a lot especially considering a can of coke was 10,000 KIP.

As always, the fiancé took over 1,000 selfies (number not confirmed!) and we walked under the shade as much as possible to avoid the insane heat from the sun, before leaving Wat Si Saket and walking up the boulevard to the Patuxai Monument modelled after the Arc Du Triumph of France.

I hadn’t realised how much the French got around in Asia before now really, in Vietnam and in Laos in particular, influencing not only the architecture and language, but also the food and flavours as well.

We stopped in to the Talat Sao Mall, mainly to enjoy the AC for a little bit and were greeted by a plethora of ‘cheap’ clothes (not cheap by Asian standards, Laos really is more expensive than the neighbouring countries!).

We continued on under the blazing sun, using the boulevard of trees to shade us as we walked up towards the Patuxai Monument.

When we arrived, we paid the 3,000 KIP ($0.35/£0.25) to climb up what felt like never ending stairs to the first upper level, then up again and again and again to reach the very top viewing tower.

Inside, on the first and second levels there were people selling clothes and souvenirs aplenty and some fans dotted about to feel a cool, most welcome breeze before continuing up the stairs.

As the sign on the wall of the monument details, this was an unfinished piece of architecture so it isn’t particularly beautiful to look at and its used most frequently as a shaded cover for locals to meet and enjoy a cold soft-drink or an ice-cream!

After that we made our way back to the hotel along a different route, stopped into the Laos version of a convenience store and got some burgers (9,000 KIP - $1/£0.80) as it was one of the cheapest options for a meal, and had a well-deserved sleep!

The next day we rented a motorcycle from a different hostel as ours didn’t have any to rent us for 70,000 KIP ($8.30/£6.30) so that we could go further afield and explore.

Tuk tuks for one trip were in the range of 200,000-350,000 KIP ($24 - $42 / £18 - £32) for the same distance we’d travel on the motorbike so we made a good investment for our 24-hour rental.

We decided to go to Buddha Park as it was the furthest thing away from us and work our way back.

Now in my infinite wisdom, I decided to direct the fiancé to take the ‘scenic’ route along the river which after taking a right turn instead of a left turn took us from the real road down a much less developed path.

When I say much less developed, what I mean is that the road looked like it had suffered severely from chickenpox with potholes so deep you could see the earth’s core at the bottom.

To say it was a bumpy ride was an understatement.

We very quickly got the picture from the locals staring at us in awe that foreigners didn’t really use this road as not only was it in a terrible condition, it also, after some considerable time rearranging our internal organs, linked up with the original ‘good’ road we were on in the first place.

Huge trucks and lorries bounced along the road like they were competing to be in a 90’s rap video as we idiotically bounded along beside them.

It was at that point that I was glad to have the fiancé behind the wheel, so to speak, as living in Myanmar his whole life, he’s used to poor quality roads and manoeuvred around most of the craters with grace and poise.

There was one point on our treacherous journey that led us through an overflowing river, which had I been navigating, it would have ended with us wet and paying out for a damaged motorcycle, but he glided through it like an ice-skater.

Brilliant is he, that man of mine!

After consulting google maps, I suggested we take an even more neglected road to cut off some of the painful journey and re-join the actual road system we were on previously.

This was both an excellent choice and an ultimately rewarding one, as despite having to drive on what I can only describe as a water-less riverbed, complete with rocks and gravel, we were privy to beautiful rice paddies and farm land surrounded by forests of trees and some gorgeous puppies!

Life!

The beauty aside, when we finally made our way back around to the main road our joy was palpable and we continued on to the Buddha Park.

For such a tourist attraction, you’d think the road leading to it would be easily ridden, but apparently our detour was not unlike many other roads in Laos and the smooth tarmac we’d been enjoying was in fact the rarity, rather than the other way around.

If you plan to visit Laos, Vientiane and the Buddha Park in particular and will go there by either motorcycle, bicycle or tuk tuk (basically anything open to the elements) it is my strictest advice to you to buy one of those terribly fetching hospital face masks to protect you from the inordinate amount of dust and filth forced up into the air by other vehicles.

Plus, if you do indulge in such a necessary purchase, you’ll be just as attractive as us…!

Finally, we arrived at the Buddha Park and were not disappointed.

I shall let my photos speak for themselves:

We decided to utilise our renting of the motorcycle and went to visit the That Luang temple as featured on a lot of Laos advertising and a staple of Laos temple culture.

The entry prices were the same as Wat Si Saket at 3,000 KIP for locals and 10,000 KIP for foreigners but in all honesty, what you can see from the outside is resplendent enough without actually going inside so we didn’t pay to go in and saved that money for dinner!

As Laos is landlocked between Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and China, the food available is heavily influenced by those countries so there was no short supply or fish curries, Pad Thai, satay, pho, or egg fried rice but we had yet to find anything distinctly Laos in the cuisine availability.

We walked until we found some locals sitting and eating near the convenience store and purchased some rice and Laos satay – a range of meat kebabs both external meats and offal, all of which were delicious.

I have very much a ‘don’t ask’ approach to food in foreign countries as generally, even liver can be tasty on a BBQ skewer!

And as always, when eating like the locals do, you save a pretty penny as well!

In the evening we went to the famed night market by the river near our hotel and to be honest, I was very disappointed. It was not the Asian night markets people usually envision with a multitude of handy-crafts and delicious snacks on offer, but rather a display of mass-produced tourist tat, poor quality and over-priced clothing with Italian pizza on offer!

We decided to use the motorcycle to view the main town at night as we had it there all paid for and found Joma Bakery and discovered that if you go there after 6pm, all of the baked goods are 50% off!
We got a huge cinnamon roll and a delicious Canadian Maple Syrup donut for 14,500 KIP ($1.70/£1.30) which made it just about a decent price!

The next day we booked our minibus to Vang Vieng (45,000 KIP each - $5.40/£4), infamous for its debauchery-plagued past but trying desperately to reform its image in recent years and made the 3-4 hour journey there to begin the next leg of our adventure.