Vientiane
Finding a hotel in Vientiane at 5pm on a Sunday was hard. We knew the centre of town pretty well by the time we found anything at all, and the first few places with empty rooms were way out of our price range. In the end we forked out big kip for a room in an over-priced medium-fancy hotel. Which has wifi in the room and free breakfast and a nice hot shower and even gasp a bath.
Having spent most of the day’s budget on the hotel, we set out to have a cheap dinner…but were tempted by one of Vientiane’s many ‘French’ restaurants and instead went for tiger shrimp and cordon bleu. If you’re going to break the budget, may as well do it properly. It was delicious. The touristy centre of Vientiane, like other urban areas in Laos is stuffed with French bakeries and restaurants of every nationality and style. I am slightly confused by what ‘French’ cuisine actually is, as all of the offerings at La Terrase, La Provencal, and La I forget what seemed Italian – pizza, pasta, and meat/fish with fries and salad or ratatouille. Any clarification on this would be much appreciated.
Vientiane seems pretty nice. There’s a lot of traffic, but that’s mostly because the roads are very narrow. It’s also very low-rise here, which two facts combined are probably what give it the small-town feel. We spent a happy rest day wandering around and looking at wats and thats (temples and stupas). Wat Si Saket was particularly nice, and also the oldest temple in Vientiane still in its original form. Its cloisters and main building contain 10,000 buddhas of various sizes. They were originally solid silver, but these were pilfered over the years and have now been mostly replaced with clay replicas coated with gold foil. The nearby Haw Pha Kaew was originally a temple built to house a giant emerald buddha…which is now ‘in the foreign abroad’, as the sign rather diplomatically put it.
And so it goes for this country. As the area we now know as Laos has been so pillaged by its neighbours and by European adventurers over the years, there isn’t much left in the way of original buildings or treasures and artefacts. As we know nothing, the statuary and temples that are here just seem to be pretty generic and unsophisticated buddhist stuff. Although we didn’t see anything especially unique, it was all quite pleasant and quiet. I’m not sure what all the tourists that are filling up the hotels are doing, but they weren’t visiting temples today.
We could only manage one rest day in Vientiane, as our Laos visas are running out and we still have 400km to the Vietnam border. Our budget probably couldn’t take a longer stay anyway. It is unfortunate that our ‘rest days’ usually end up as anything but – with tourism, bike tuning, shopping and errand-ing these days are busier and more stressful than days when we can just get on a bike and go. We’ve been on the road for six weeks now, and it has become clear that we have a lot of unneccessary excess baggage, so a lot of today was spent posting 7 kg of it back to Shanghai. Hopefully that will make our next 400km over the Annamite Mountains and into Vietnam much easier.
AW
Photos from this post can be found here
Since a small remark in there made me feel compelled to comment, here i am commenting : I’m not sure of what would qualify as “French cuisine”, but all in all, I’m pretty sure most French people would agree that pizza, noodles and French fries (despite the name) are not especially French. At least, 100% of the people surveyed agreed on that**
In any case, ratatouille is French (or Mediterranean perhaps?). I would tend to say that most of French dishes are ones with a lot of sauce and/or wine (coq au vin, pot au feu, boeuf bourguignon, etc.)
But then again, those who ate some of the food i cooked know that until know, what i cooked was more “put all of those things i like together and hope it’s good” (and more than never it is), so i’m probably not the best reference on all of that.
If you ever find the answer, i’m interested, though.
**(pool surveyed : me).