V

ientiane, Capital of Laos

 

May 16 - 25, 2001






Laotian flag




Click on photos to open them full size.


The ten days we spent in Vientiane were, for us, spent in the lap of luxury. Our little hotel on the edge of town (4km from the center) was built around a courtyard swimming pool, itself surrounded by a profusion of tropical flowers and shrubs. Alongside the pool was the restaurant where we ate breakfast every morning after an early morning swim and most evenings after another swim. Our second floor room had a small balcony that overlooked the pool. Jan thought she'd landed in heaven!

In spite of the attraction of the pool, we did ride into town on bikes every other day to visit the handful of temples that make up the sights. Having already visited Thailand, we were interested to compare the temples of Vientiane with those we had visited in Chiang Mai. Laotian temples are on the whole much poorer and so not brightly painted and adorned like so many of the Thai temples. Perhaps it was just this difference which made them so appealing to us. The deeply-pitched roofs and wooden walls were dark brown rather than bright orange-red. The wall-paintings both in and outside of the temples were faded and romantic. And the gardens and grounds were quiet and peaceful by comparison to the busy coming and going of tourists and worshippers seen in many of Chiang Mai's temples. The communist distrust of religion was quite apparent here in the capital, although later in Luang Prabang we would find much stronger religious feelings.

The whole of the country is very quiet and sleepy even compared to poor and underdeveloped Vietnam. There is none of the hustle and bustle of Hanoi or Saigon. The tourists are few in number and the facilities few also. Nonetheless, in Vientiane the handicrafts seemed very expensive. Jan  bought one or two small items but compared to Vietnam it was vastly overpriced. In other cities that we visited the prices were better, suggesting that Vientiane's closeness to the Thai border were partly to blame or perhaps just a stricter Communist control of prices.

On our first excursion into town we found an Internet cafe that had only been open two weeks. A young married couple had (with family help we assumed) bought ten brand-new desktop computers and set themselves up in business. They were charging 150 kip a minute (2 cents a minute), which only a few days later came down to 100 kip a minute. The husband was a civil engineer and had kept his day job. The wife spoke quite good English and later took Jan along the street behind their Internet cafe to show her the billiards room, weight-lifting room, and aerobics room that her parents owned. The family is clearly one of the new entrepreneurial families of Laos.

On almost our first evening in Vientiane, Jan was sitting on our hotel room balcony reading when she suddenly noticed a gekko (small lizard-like creature) on the wall to her right. Soon after she noticed him, he moved rather suddenly about a foot and then she saw why. About two feet away from him was a moth on the wall and he was obviously stalking it. He waited a couple of seconds and then another rapid move of a foot and he had the creature in his mouth and after two or three chomps, swallowed it down. This was the first time Jan had seen a gekko hunting and feeding so she was really pleased when he repeated the exercise. The moth was probably less pleased. The basic technique was to move very quickly within range and then pounce.




November 9, 2001