Trip to Vientiane

We left our luxury accommodation in Luang Prabang, the Lakhang Thong Hotel didn’t really live up to the reviews, but the room was nice and given the price it was very enjoyable.

We set off at 7am for Vientiane, going via a really good coffee shop for breakfast. It had a very French influence.

Then we hit the road. A couple of tour companies told us that driving between Luang Prabang and Vientiane wasn’t really possible, since the road was very bad. Mr Tot said no problems, I do it all the time. We started out on the main road and Mr Tot said, don’t worry it will get much smoother in 12 kms. After passing a few broken down trucks and passing several other trucks coming from China, the road improved for 2 kms, then went back to a pot holed mess. We weaved from side to side at around 20-30 kph trying to find flat parts of the road, continued to pass broken down trucks of the side of the road until we eventually took a short cut, that was actually longer, but less trucks and a better road. All we could say is that other road must have been shocking.

After an hour and a half of bouncing around we had a toilet stop, which was hilarious if you weren’t female.

Then we were back on the road weaving between chickens and water buffalo. At one stage we had to go around a cow feedings its calf in the middle of the road.

Another hour later we reached the top of the mountain, called 9km Peak, where stopped for coffee and enjoyed the lookout, it was magnificent.

We would have had a toilet stop here, but they had run out of water and wouldn’t waste what little they had on a toilet. The trip down the mountain was no less eventful and after 5 hours and 180km, we finally reached Vang Vieng. This is the town where the 5 young backpackers died of suspected alcohol poisoning. Vang Vieng was clearly a backpackers paradise with rafts floating down the river, kayaking, floating bars lots of dune buggies to hire.

We stopped at an upmarket restaurant for lunch, which was set in a rice field.

The restaurant was very nice and the views great. I ordered the IPA and was given two since it was happy hour, Neil only got one normal beer? After tasting the IPA, I think they just wanted to get rid of it. After lunch Mr Tot insisted on taking us the Blue Lagoon, which is a big tourist attraction here.

The lagoon was like a big farm dam with lots of young backpackers swinging out into the water or zip lining into the water. It was a very pleasant sight for a dirty old man, there was much left to the imagination. There were also hundreds of young girls sitting around drinking a smoking. The ratio was about 3 girls to every guy, all European tourists. We went for a walk to a cave, crossing this very safe bridge. As we got close, we met up with an older couple who were covered in mud. They said that the trip into the cave was very narrow and slippery so we turned around and went back to our car.

On leaving Vang Vieng, we quickly got onto the China-Lao toll road (which has only made it from Vientiane to Vang Vieng). The last 130km of our trip took just over an hour, then another half hour in traffic to our hotel.

We are now staying in the Green Park Boutique hotel and we are happy to say it is much better than our previous hotel.