Thursday 2 August 2007

Spiders, Guns and a Hopeless Hotel

We stumbled off our bus in Vientiane not too worse for ware considering the road we had just driven. It wasn't just the unending winding-ness but the utter remoteness of it, and the awareness that the bus was mostly full of western tourists. Highwaymen (being robbers not repairers) are not common in Laos (actually neither are the repairers) but they do exist (the robbers) and we passed quite a few suspicious individuals and small parties on the road who were armed to the teeth but didn't really fit the bill of law enforcer. It's hard to know though. On one occasion we were stopped by a uniformed 16 year old boy who looked the cabin up and down and then interrogated the driver while his AK47 (or something like that) hung round his shoulder with the barrel staring me down, a couple of rows back. He was probably genuine, we didn't seem to have what or who he was looking for and we carried on our way. But it was not lost to us that our bus was probably quite a good seize if we did meet the wrong people on the road. On the plus side, we stopped at a little cafe for lunch and had a really good feed, all included in the ticket price.


In Vientienne, we checked into what we thought was the premier hotel for one night only, to celebrate Nic's birthday. It was an absolute dump and we were out like a flash first thing in the morning (well, not before we inspected the terrifying breakfast buffet, welded to the bottom of the hot-pots and took a dip in the pool you couldn't see the bottom of). We promptly checked into a much smaller, cheaper and nicer guest house down the road. The big hotel, which was a state-run endeavour (we really should have spotted that big clue) didn't care less that we were leaving so abruptly, except for the bell boy who's heart visibly broke when Nic said we checking into another hotel round the corner. A speedy re-assurance that it was because the big hotel was too expensive and we were just there for a birthday treat went some way to console the chap, but we left having knocked a little more pride out of the only person in the establishment who had any for it in the first place.

Vientiane shares many of Luang-Prabang's traits. Despite being the capital city, it still has a relaxed air about it. The first mall had just opened about a fortnight before we arrived (our inspection revealed a half occupied precinct, with shops still getting fitted out, a food court that was still getting to grips with itself and a guard with a machine gun on the mezzanine), and there were plenty of monks to be seen about town too. There were plenty of cash machines to be found in the capital which was good because we also found another Joma coffee shop and spent lots of time (and Kip) looking out on the world from within the air con sanctuary. One of Vientiane's tourist sights is it's Arc de Triomphe which is a full scale slightly unfinished concrete replica of the one in France, and serves as the focal point in a big park. The copy was built in the 60's with money and concrete donated by the US for Laos to build a runway with. As such it is nick named the vertical runway.

Just across the road from our hotel was the Mekong River again, and there were plenty of dining opportunities to be had from hawker kitchens set up with plastic tables and chairs all the way along it's side. Directly across the river from here was Thailand where we saw a power cut descend the opposite shore into darkness one night while we ate and enjoyed fully working Laotian power. Plastic chairs might not sound particularly posh but they were a good bit better than the proper rattan furniture we dined on one night in a Mexican restaurant when, after dinner we got up and found that our clothes had all been stained permanently from an anti-bug spray that had been applied to the chairs but not yet cleaned down. The manager was very apologetic and took our clothes to the dry-cleaners but alas, they never recovered (and probably neither did the cleaners - they scrubbed so hard that the pattern was faded beneath the stubborn stains). Ironically too, that was the night that we saw our first (and to date only) full size totally wild tarantula sized spider, which we first spotted on the wall a few meters from our table. As we looked at it, deciding it was probably real, a waiter moved in a manner that alarmed it and faster than I have ever seen anything move in my life it was gone around the corner. The speed of the thing was utterly gob smacking and I wouldn't immediately assume to be fast enough to outrun it if it had come to the Mexican for dinner too.

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