Vientiane, the capital city of Laos

Sometimes, it takes a bit to understand a city. We had been in Laos for 2 weeks so we understand the food, the money and a little bit of the culture. We had planned 4 nights in Vientiane to finish out our time in Laos and complete our 3 months in Asia. We had 3 full days to explore the biggest city in the country. The first day we wandered around town and weren’t really impressed. Entire streets were dug up and it didn’t look like they were working hard to get them fixed. Sidewalks were equally messed up but that isn’t that abnormal for many places in Southeast Asia. We went to the river for dinner and had some fresh seafood but the view over the Mekong river to Thailand did not look that interesting. The river was very wide and much of the riverbed was not used during the dry season. We didn’t see any tourist dinner cruises like we saw in Luang Prabang. We knew we were going to have to look a little harder to find the charm in this city.

We decided we needed a tour to better understand this town so the next day we took a tour with 3 other couples to see the big sites of Vientiane. The first stop was the famous Buddha park. It is a park started in 1958 with over 200 concrete statues. It was quite a collection of buddhas and other sculptures of animals and demons. The biggest one was a giant pumpkin with 3 levels representing hell, earth and heaven. A lot of this was just weird. Our tour guide gave us over an hour to walk around the park and we really only needed about 20 minutes.

Our guide then told us some stories about the Laos culture deals with death and funerals. He then took us to a farm and let us check out how some rural families actually live. Unfortunately, there weren’t many people to talk to on the farm because the entire village was at a funeral. We started to drive back to town and we ended up driving right through the funeral as they were preparing for cremation. It was pretty awkward but also really interesting. He then took us to a simple lunch of Lao chicken noodle soup for $6 for both us. The food wasn’t spectacular but it was still a good experience to eat outside of the tourist restaurants in town.

We then drove to the big temples in Vientiane. This was the real “park” of this city. We were starting to believe there weren’t any open spaces for people. There were temples and some big monuments with locals paying respect to the buddhas and a lot of Chinese tourists around taking pictures. We saw one of the biggest reclining buddhas in the world.

The next day we did a lot more wandering around and found some better neighborhoods. We found couple of good blocks of restaurants and some places that would have some nightlife (if we wanted to stay up). There was a huge night market with some carnival rides next to the river. The atmosphere was pretty fun even though it was a Monday night. I think we found the charm that I believe is hiding in all cities. Sometimes it just takes some time to find it.

Our time in Laos is done and we are headed to Turkiye. We needed to fly through Bangkok and we decided to spend a couple of nights there to break up the long travel days. We have been to Bangkok before but we had missed the UNESCO site of Ayutthaya. We have been to so many ancient ruins that we felt a day tour here would be a good part of our ruins portfolio. It was interesting but I don’t think I need to post about it. I will just add a couple of Ayutthaya photos here and you will again hear from us in Antalya, Turkiye.