A Rear View Shire: Fleeting Moments in Vientiane

So, first things first on this morning, I visited JoMo Cafe for some more bread eggs and bacon, and coffee, then I hopped straight onto a bus to go to Vientiane. It was a pretty good sized bus, and truth be told, the ride was super uneventful. In fact, my entire entry about Vientiane is going to be pretty short, as I didn’t do very much at all.

The bus ride to Vientiane took about 7-9 hours, I don’t perfectly recall now. I still hadn’t purchased a Lao SIM card, and there were no reasonable places to book online, so I was hoping I’d just be able to find something when I got there.

The ride itself went through a lot of beautiful, extremely hilly terrain. The main reason that transportation from place to place in Laos takes so long is because of this terrain. Its super inefficient, and I imagine if they had lots of tunnels bored through hillsides or direct train lines, it would take 50% or even less of the time to get from city to city.

Every guide source tells you to learn the ways of patience, to never be in a hurry while in this country, though, so you can’t be too suprirsed. We took a pit stop at some random roadside restaurant which specifically caters to bus travelers; I was served a horrid lunch that I could barely eat any of. So I bought some Lays and some beer, and sauntered out of the place to take some pictures of the area with my iPhone, which you can see here:

It seemed pretty clear that they were not accustomed to having any Western travelers actually walk around outside of these restaurant, as all of the villagers in the area were wide-eyed and wary, although the children, predictably, were a little more warm. I wandered as far up as I could, and then back, and took comfort in what shade as there was, until finally people were called back up onto the bus.

This was one of the few transit rides I’d been on thus far where no one was talkative, towards me, anyway. So I got some reading done, and some fake sleeping as well. Good times, eh?

Finally, we made it to Vientiane. Somehow at the end of this, I think I had actually made the acquaintance of a couple of people, though I suspect it could have just as simply been meeting them on the street outside of the bus as they were looking at a map trying to figure out where to go. We all piled into tuk tuks at the bus station, and there was one tuk tuk with about 10 of us, which, with all of our stuff, meant it was pretty cramped. I actually had to stand on the bumper and hold on for dear life to some luggage straps on the roof.

We were dumped at a central point in downtown Vientiane, which I quickly located on my little map in my Lonely Planet Southeast Asia guide. I bid the others farewell, and started walking off in the direction of various guesthouses listed within the guide. All of them were booked full, though the one that was most heavily recommended by the guidebook told me to come back the next day if I wanted to, that it was just this day that was fully booked.

The place I DID end up was a little more expensive than I had been hoping for, at about almost 20 dollars for a night, or something like that, but it certainly was a decent room that they had for me, at least. Signs abounded about not bringing in “overnight visitors” and such, and I laughed, then took a shower, and went out to get some dinner.

I went straight towards the Mekong River to look for food. There was a smattering of life and business all around the bank of it, and I spotted an area that looked like a sprawling restaurant “Seating area” laid out on the dry banks of the river, which lots of tables with sets of mats that had like a 45 degree angle back, allowing you to sit with a major recline facing out towards the river.

Shortly after I took a seat, someone came by with a menu, and I promptly ordered noodles with meat and veggies and a beer Lao. They really took the idea of not being in a rush to an extreme, as it was perhaps an hour until I got my food. Another American guy sitting alone at the table next to mine exchanged glances with me a few times as he waited forever for his food as well; we probably said a few words about the situation, but nothing too much.

The food did come, eventually, though, and when it came was good. I had my fill of it, then walked around some going nowhere in particular; I explored the streets just looking to see what existed there.

I didn’t find much, although there was a gaggle of hookers situated around the internet cafe I went in to, which I found odd. While talking to Christine, she suggested that it was because that was where all the foreigners were likely to be found in there, and that they’re some of the most likely clients. I couldn’t really argue with this logic, so maybe that’s the answer!

Anyway, I spent an hour or so on the internet, and then ran through the pack of suspiciously gruff prostitutes to get down an alley and wander some more in more mellow parts of the city. Things closed down later than they had in Luang Prabang, but still pretty early, and there wasn’t that much going on anyway.

I went to bed, and got up. I had little to do other than go straight to a different place to stay, so I went back to the cheaper, highly recommended location and booked a night or two. I also rented a bike and asked for directions to the Chinese embassy, though I also took my guidebook with me, as it had a Chinese embassy listed on its map.

He wished me luck, but said he didn’t think the embassy would actually be open. I hoped for the best, found another JoMo here as there was in Luang Prabang (even ordered the same thing) and then set off.

It was further away than the map led me to believe. Also, the area where most of the embassies were was in complete disarray, and it seems that they had improbably actually moved to other buildings since the publication of this guide, or that this guide had not accurately marked their positions, as the German, Chinese, and Burmese consulates were not at all in the positions in relation to each other that the guide book had suggested.

I found the Burmese consulate first, and used that as my bearing to find the Chinese one; when I got to where the Chinese one SHOULD have been, it was a nondescript building, so I wandered in a direction and hoped for the best; amazingly, I stumbled across it with little difficulty.

Sure enough, it was closed, and for the entire week, at that. So I considered my position for a moment, and instantly made the decision to get the heck out of Vientiane and head straight back up, not all the way to Luang Prabang, but to the halfway point of Vang Vieng.

I biked back to my guesthouse, and explained the situation, and told him I wanted to immediately get on a bus to Vang Vieng, and asked for a refund on my booking, as I had only “used” the room for an hour and a half. He said that he’d have to keep a portion of it, but I still got the majority of it back, so, at least there was that; and within just an hour, I was aboard a crappy little van to Vang Vieng, crammed in with a variety of people. I sat in the front, along with this frickin goliath of a Hungarian-American guy. He rode bitch while I had shotgun, but that was little consolation for myself, as the two of us combined were wider than any of the other sets of three behind us.

For the next five hours, he and I got to know each other fairly well, indeed, moreso than we probably had wished given the way we were jammed against each other. We had pretty similar interests, and he had graduated with an Economics degree, but he had taken a rather circumspect route with his life, instead of finishing high school, then college, then work. Not too dissimilar from my own experience thus far, actually. We ended up talking about the economic crisis for the better portion of at least one hour, I won’t bore you with the details of our opinions!

We had an ice cream break (also known as a bathroom break, but when there’s ice cream nearby, its guaranteed to turn into an ice cream break as well). I don’t know what it is about traveling; I’ve eaten more ice cream while traveling than probably any other point in my life.

Got back on the van, and bulldozed through the next couple hours of driving; Hungarian man tried his best to sleep, which mean I had to deal with his hulking figure slumbering against me. I did my best to ignore it and read through Burmese Days. Finally, we made it, and first things first, we were dropped off at a place that had rather expensive lodgings, of course, so Hungarian man and I said “yeah thanks but no thanks” and saw our way out, wandering up the street to find better prices.

We tried the first couple guesthouses, but they were either full up or also semi expensive. There was a little dirt path off to the side that led to what appeared to be more lodgings; I decided I wanted to check it out, but Hungarian man decided to take his chance with another bigger guesthouse further down the road. I wished him the best, and sauntered down. Turns out that these guesthouse huts were dirt cheap; I definitely made the right choice. I checked myself in for a couple nights, set my stuff down, and got ready to be in Vang Vieng.

Before I did much of anything else, though, I snapped off a couple of pictures of the scenery before the sun went all the way down: