The Last of Laos

We are currently in Vientiane, Laos, the capital of the country. We arrived here yesterday by public bus/truck and once again, it is HOT. It was so nice up in the northern part of the country with all the mountains and daily rain showers and clouds. Still hot up there, but bearable. Here, it is hardly bearable. So I looked online, because we've been complaining so much and become so lethargic, I figured it must be well over 100 degrees. Phooey, it's only 90. But then I looked at Bangkok.....98. Yikes, I guess we should stop complaining. The best news, is that in Tanzania (our next big destination), the hottest temp I could find was in the mid 70's. Yay!

So we finished up our bike trip with one big marathon ride all the way from Luang Prabang back to Vang Vieng. We stopped at the half way point, but it was still early and decided to push on. Then stopped at the next major town and did peek our heads into a couple guesthouses, but no one was around so we took it as fate and made a final sprint for 'home'. That day we rode about 230km! It total, for our whole trip we figured we covered about 1,017 km. Not bad. That last day of riding was all backtracking, but in some ways coming from a new direction and being on bikes it didn't feel redundant at all. Even a change in the weather makes the scenery appear different. A beautiful ride none-the-less. Here is some more scenery photos for you to look at (are you tired of them yet?)...

This is about halfway between Luang Prabang and Vang Vieng. Just south of Phu Khoun.


A little closer to Vang Vieng. A look at the road we've been driving:


Really getting close to Vang Vieng now....

And finally, just about 20km north of Vang Vieng as we are trying to beat the setting sun...


We spent two days in Vang Vieng, staying at an organic farm/guesthouse outside of town. A nice way to get away from the falang hoards in town. (By the way mom, it is falang in Laos, and farang in Thailand...to refer to Westerners). They serve pretty good, all organic food, and mulberry everything (shakes, pancakes, etc) as their primary crop is mulberries.

The one thing everyone does in Vang Vieng is inner tube down a small stretch of the Nam Song River. While we envisioned a fast paced river with some mild rapids, we were a bit disappointed as it was pretty slow moving water, and lots of paddling (from which we are pathetically sore, thank you very much!). What they did have instead were many riverside bars serving an immense amount of BeerLao, and huge, gnarley rope swings! Two of them were crazy. The bamboo support stand/ladder/platform sat about 30 feet off the water, and you hold on to a handle connected to a big cable that is anchored way over your head, and once you get the courage to push yourself off the platform, you swing like mad, making a huge arch where at the peak of the swing you are just slightly lower than the platform from which you started, where you let go and plunge into the river. The first time I did it I was too scared to let go, so I swang back and forth a couple times (pretty darn fun), but the second time I let go at the peak (pretty fun as well). This was way scarier for me than those crazy zip lines for some reason. Keith went several more times than I did and perfected his piroette entry into the water as well as his backwards launch. We didn't bring our camera with us, but some girls we met took some pictures for us and promised to email them to us...we'll post them as soon as we get them.

We left the next day for Vientiane, and we are kind of petering out on the sightseeing and are a bit anxious to get to Bangkok and get a book on Africa so we can start planning that leg of our journey. So pretty laid back days here. We did go out this morning to see what I think is the largest stupa in the world. I don't know too much about it except that it has become the National symbol for Laos and is on the cover of our book, so we had to go see it and get a picture of one of us standing in front of it. Here it is:


We don't plan to so much else here. We've got an airconditioned room, so we're loving that naturally. We'll check out the local night market tonight then it's off to the border across the Friendship Bridge tomorrow evening and an overnight train to Bangkok.