Welcome to Laos

Rumour has it that the border crossing into Laos is worse than the one into Cambodia...fortunately since me and Ayms needed to start making some time back, we had the perfect excuse to not spend 24 hours on a bus (and the next 24 hours recovering) and we booked some flights. It was bliss, we left Hanoi in the morning and arrived in Vientiane a couple of hours later!

Vientiane is the capital city and is really quite small and peaceful (and you can see the stars!) - you don't realise how noisy Vietnam is until you leave it. We booked into the cheapest place we could find - another box with iron bed frames and matresses made for toddlers and stairs that would require safety harnesses were we anywhere else in the world. We took advantage of our extra day and went wandering around the city. Our map reading skills should be improving but we managed to go the long way round to get to Laos' answer to the Arc de Triomphe, stumbling across the black stupa along the way.

In the afternoon it was too hot to anything so we went in search of the swimming pool. In the evening we hung out by the river and had some good food and drink for another measley sum of money. Day 2 in Vientiane was spent at the Buddha park, which is a field full of concrete statues representing Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam (I think) - including a hell mouth with morbid sculptures of skulls inside and yet another reclining Buddha.