Backpacking Vientiane – The Capital of Laos

Vientiane is the capital of Laos though its only home to 750,000 people. When we started backpacking Vientiane on arrival, we realized there is an ‘old’ center district of the city that sits along the Mekong River. We arrived into town in the afternoon from Vang Vieng and my friend was hoping to catch a meditation course that runs once a week in a temple not too far from the center. It was still a ten minute ride by tuk tuk so we threw in all our bags and  headed that way before we even found a place to stay.

Patuxai Monument (meaning Victory Monument) was built in honor of those who fought for Lao independence from France

After a quick lunch, I decided to stay with our bags at the restaurant since I had no desire to show up to a temple toting four backpacks and then try to leave them sitting unsecured. Well it wasn’t but two hours later that the restaurant I was waiting in was closing up shop and of course, it was storming violently outside. Within ten minutes of the storm starting, my friend showed up after having run through the rain straight from the temple.

Yep, that’s the hot dog that came with breakfast – not a sausage by any means…

I told her we had to leave the restaurant but we knew of no guesthouses in the area. The girls running the restaurant spoke no English but we communicated enough together for them to understand where we were trying to go and they were trying to tell us where one was as they pointed behind the restaurant. Since I knew it would take some exploring on foot before finding this one guesthouse, I was hoping to just wait out the storm but after five more minutes of discussion back and forth between us and them, they led us out of the restaurant.

Bit of a knot here…

We grabbed our bags and followed them out into the thunder and lightning. We first took a hard left down a small alleyway which led us behind the restaurant and then it was another left down another alleyway. After ten minutes of walking in this downpour, I was wondering how much worse the situation could be when I realized a lot of the water we had to walk through smelled of the sewer and that is when I realized just how wonderful it was to have to lug my two bags, with one overhead, through four inches of sewer water in my beloved flip flops. Yay. We eventually made it to the only guesthouse in this area after making two more turns down some alleyways. Had these two girls from the restaurant not shown us the way, I’m quite sure we would have never found this place. But even though it was a wet, disgusting walk, I was grateful these girls had decided to show us the way. The guesthouse, as I had guessed, was disgusting and probably the worst place I’d stayed in months but what options did we have? We were in a section of Vientiane where we were the only tourists around and almost no one spoke English in this part of the city. This became even more apparent when we went out for dinner. Somehow, we even had stopped by eight different places before finding a place to eat dinner because every one that we went by had said they were ‘closed’ even though it was only 7 P.M. We still don’t know if it truly was too late for most of these local diners or if they just didn’t want to serve foreigners due to the language barrier.

The following day we relocated (thankfully) to the center part of town. After finding a guesthouse just off the Mekong River, we rented bikes for the day and cruised around Vientiane. One of our stops was the city’s swimming pool center and later that afternoon, we rode to the local food market. It was very similar to other markets I’d been to but you just never know what to expect when you walk through one. In this one, you had your pick of live frogs and snakes, a pig head and what seemed to be a collection of almost every freshwater fish imaginable.

We headed to place called Buddha Park on another day. To be honest, at this point in my trip after traveling through Tibet, Nepal, India and Thailand, I was about Buddha’d out. I would imagine at this point, I’ve probably seen somewhere in the neighborhood of 3000 to 4000 Buddha statues or figures from the inside of caves and temples to the top of mountains. But hey, this was a park dedicated to Buddha. I felt I just had to go! It was a crazy bus ride out there as we took a local bus and the road to get there had some extremely rough sections. I think a camel would have been a more comfortable ride…When we arrived to the park, I decided it was worth the drive though mainly due to the fact that most of the statues within the park were unlike many others I’d seen. In fact many of them were just straight weird!

Buddha Park

After getting back into town, when realized there wasn’t a whole lot else to do or see when backpacking Vientiane. There is a night market that runs along the Mekong and takes place every night but I’d definitely seen my fair share of markets the past couple months while in southeast Asia.

Yep, there were plenty of statues throughout the Buddha Park that would leave you a bit confused…

After four days in Vientiane, we decided to head back north to Vang Vieng. My friend had to renew her two week Visa while here, which is ideal while backpacking Vientiane because its sits on the border with Thailand but now that we had two more weeks to travel within Laos, we found a volunteer project outside of Vang Vieng where we were heading back to…