The journey from vang vieng to Vientianne was only 3 hours long and was fairly pleasant. We arrived into Vientianne at around 1.30 and took a very short tuk tuk ride to our hostel which was called Funkey Monkey Hostel. The hostel itself was fine, we were in a 12 bed dorm and when we arrived there was a man sleeping on the floor in our room which was a bit strange but he had left by the time we got back from lunch. We were all starving and oddly craving thai food so headed over to a thai-lao place across the road. I ordered a papaya salad and sticky rice which was nice, basically shredded veg in a very garlicky sauce. I was enjoying it until Becki spotted all the ants crawling around my sticky rice, and the dead one on my fork. It kind of spoilt it. Amy and Kate had a pad thai which was ant free and Becki - still not up to eating - had a few mouthfulls of vegetable fried rice, also ant free.
We spent the afternoon wandering around Vientianne pretty aimlessly. There isn't that much to do there and we'd planned to do everything we had wanted to the next day so it was nice to have some downtime.
In the evening we headed to the night market where I found my replacement mp3 players, I was so pleased I bought 2 for 45000 kips (about £4) for both. Winner.
We then headed for Food and Becki went back to the hostel to sleep because she still wasn't up to eating. The meal we had was lush. Because it was out last night in Laos we decided to splash out. We each had a cocktail and some appetisers. I had fish and chips (the best chips I've had since I left England), Amy had a tortilla stack with wedgies and Kate had falafel, pitta and wedges. We all went to bed very content and full.
The next morning we got a taxi to Buddha Park which is a statue park about 25kms outside of Vientianne. There is a big reclining buddha there and some really creepy but pretty ace other statues too. The best one was a kind of sphere you could go into through a mouth and climb up onto the top. Its hard to describe but it was cool.
We got back about half 12 and went for lunch. I've talked too much about food in this post already and it wasn't a very exciting meal ( a pretty tasty tuna baguette) so I won't bore you with any more food descriptions. In the afternoon we went to a museum called COPE which talks all about the secret war in Laos and the damage done to them in the vietnam war. It was really interesting but obviously really sad, Laos is the most bombed country by capita and still about 100 people a year are injured by unexploded bombs from the war. It also talked about the work COPE does for amputees as it makes prosthetics and helps in rehabilitation for the victims. Looking around it once again just made me so thankful for the NHS, a lot of the people we read about died because of lack of blood and oxygen at the local hospitals.
We got back to the hostel, picked up some snacks and then the bus came to pick us up ready for our long journey to Vietnam. Laos has been really beautiful but I'm really excited about Vietnam, I think its going to be really interesting and I want to know more about the history there.
