Vientiane - What Wat is That?

Hello again :)

John and I are huge fans of the Fred Hollows Foundation. For those who don't know, this charity works in various parts of the world ensuring that even the poorest people have access to eye care. They've done some amazing things, including devising simple cataract operations that can be carried out just about anywhere and building a couple of factories in poorer countries that manufacture lenses for a fraction of the price you would pay in a first-world country. The foundation started in Australia and spread from there.

We knew they operated in Cambodia and Laos and so we contacted the Sydney office to find out if we could visit. After a number of emails back and forth, we finally arranged to meet the team in Vientiane, the capital of Laos.

We rolled up at the office and were welcomed with open arms. On the left is Souphonesa, the Laos country manager. She's a very smart lady. She's won scholarships to universities in Australia (she studied at Monash Uni) and elsewhere, and has held some impressive positions. The two girls on our right also worked there.

We also met the management at the eye hospital and were given an extensive overview of the hospital's operations. We all made formal introductions and sat in a large meeting room for a formal presentation. The manager there was only new and was very enthusiastic. Unexpectedly, we were given gifts - John was given a framed silver Loas scene and I was given a beautiful silk scarf.

Coincidentally, the day we visited the FHF was also the day that the Australian Embassy was holding their Australia Day event. The FHF people were invited so they asked us along. It was an amazing night. The event was held outdoors and it was so hot! Men in suits had sweat pouring off them. Ladies were generally well covered so I was glad I had my new scarf to cover my shoulders. 

The ambassasor gave an impressive speech and Australian tourism videos showed all night. The food was incredible - trays of Aussie lamb sliders, bocconcini sticks and famous local sausages were presented with little Aussie flags in them and were served from silver platters. And this was just the starters! After that, people queued up for roast lamb and salads. Most amazing of all though was the cheese selection with huge slabs of brie that were served up at room tempreature - about 30 degrees! The gooey mess was heaven for John! This was followed by a variety of desserts, including lamingtons. It must have cost a fortune!

It was a rather formal event and John and I had no good clothes. I quickly bought a pair of sparkly sandals in a market and got away with my dress and the new scarf, but poor John had no time to find long pants. He was the only one there in shorts so we stood behind a table all night so nobody could see his lower half!

Over the coming days we expored the town. The name of the pub in this photo is Wind West Pub & Restaurant. We thought it was just a silly place with a dumb spelling mistake - it's clearly supposed to read "Wild West" however apparently it's one of the biggest nightclubs in town!

We came across a statue of a past king. Around the base were hundreds of model horses and elephants. We have no idea why.

Those of you that have been to Vietnam might recognise this - the amazing mess of cables lining the streets.

We had timed our trip to be in Vientiane for Chinese New Year, or Tet for the Vietnamese. Apparently there are enough Chinese and Vietnamese people here to make the New Year celebrations an event. There are many nationalities here and our hotel was a classic example. The people who worked there were Laotian, Vietnamese and Chinese, and many of them didn't speak English, so sometimes they couldn't communicate with each other! If we asked the Vietnamese guy where to get good Lao food, he would say there is no such thing as good Lao food. If we asked the Lao guy about Chinese New Year he would grumble that of course he doesn't know anything about that! Consequently, we got most of our info about Chinese New Year celebrations from the Lao/Chilean couple who ran our favourite cafe! Across the road from the cafe was a Vietnamese temple, so the owner of the cafe said it would be a good place to come to see what was happening. There might even be some people dressed up as Chinese lions.

What they didn't tell us was that the Chinese and Vietnamese also do the fireworks thing at midnight on the night before! We were woken to loud bangs as our Chinese staff lit crackers on the footpath right outside the hotel. They were delighted but I don't think the guests or the Laotian staff were!

The next day we visited the Vietnamese temple and it was lovely. It was decorated with flowers and lanterns.

There were a few monks and even some nuns.

Red was obviously the special colour to wear. Most people had something red on.

Some kids had their very best red clothes on.

Sadly though, there were no dancing lion performances. I'm really glad we saw it though. It was really lovely.

Many wats lined the streets of Vientiane. They were all enormous. While wandering past a fairly small and inconspicuous one, we heard a drum. We followed the noise and found a group of monks sitting inside the main temple. 

An older monk struck a gong and it was clear something was happening. To our disgust, a tourist with a big camera openly took photos, standing right in front of the monks to get the best pics. It was so rude. 

Just after we arrived, the monks started to chant. It was really special.

When the chanting finished, they all turned around and started eating their simple rice meal. Again, the tourist continued to take photos. For goodness sake, hasn't he seen people eat before? The monks didn't react at all. I think they're used to it.

A couple of stunning Buddhas sat at the end of the temple.

So many of the temples here are strikingly decorated on the outside but this one was quite plain. It gives little indication of all the beauty inside.

We later checked out some of the more decorated wats. They're amazing!

On our last day we found this really beautiful one. Every inch of the place was painted or decorated in some way.

Even the huge gong was painted!

Scary creatures guarded against evil.

We were wandering along a back street to get to our next destination when we heard drumming. Never people to let an opportunity pass, we followed the noise. To our delight we found a New Year event happening at a private home! It was a day late but perhaps that doesn't matter. Dancing creatures (are they lions? dragons? we're not sure!) came down the street and performed in front of the house.

The family then all posed for endless photos with the performers.

There was a small band and plenty of performers that kept rotating positions in the creatures.

We dragged ourselves away from the performance and headed to the COPE Visitor Info Centre. COPE stands for Co-operative Orthotic and Prosthetic Enterprise and is a group dedicated to helping people who have had limbs blown off by mines leftover from the war. The American "secret war" targetted the Ho Chi Minh trail, which ran through Laos. Again, they were trying to cut the supply lines going into Vietnam.

The damage the Americans did was incredible. They ran so many bombing runs in Laos that they dropped an average of a plane load of bombs, every 8 minutes, day and night, for 9 years! Plus, many of those bombs were cluster bombs. These are large bombs that open mid-air and release up to 640 smaller bombs, each about the size of an orange. To make matters worse, an estimated 30% of those bombs didn't explode on impact. That left millions of unexploded bombs scattered across the country. Again, people get killed or maimed every year. For some reason, the Apopo rat programme hasn't reached here so all mine clearing is still being laboriously done by metal detectors. 

There are incredible stories of people who have been injured. Many people live in remote communities and sometimes don't make it to medical help in time. The lack of proper prosthetic limbs is a huge problem. Check out the sign below.

It seems to us that these sorts of places are doing such a fantastic job. COPE now does regular visits to remote communities as well. There are people who have lived for many years without a leg or arm and are just getting prosthetic ones for the first time now. It's incredible.

There are calls to ban cluster bombs around the world and many countries have agreed, however some haven't so this terrible situation where people suffer for decades after a war has finished will continue.

We explored more of Vientiane, including this Arc de Triomphe-style arch. It was built using the concrete that the Americans donated to build a runway!

Weirdly, we found this elephant sculpture made out of cups and saucers!

Our last stop was a stupa that's really important to the Buddhists, but it was nowhere near as spectacular as the wats.

It did have some beautiful 400 year-old statues though.

Vientiane is a strange kind of capital city. It's not that big and it has a great mix of cultures and food, yet it's still quite noisy, crowded and dirty. Lots of expats live there and seem to enjoy it though.

Bye for now!
Heather and John.

Laos - Rivers, Caves and Songtaews.

Hello again and welcome back to hot and dusty Laos!

We had a long journey ahead of us, about 500kms, to get from the Four Thousand Islands in the south to a place off the main north-south highway called Tham Kong Lor. This is a cave that's supposed to be amazing. If it wasn't for this, we would have flown the long distance all the way to Vientiane, the capital. Instead, it would take us three days of travel to get there by public transport.

We booked a hotel in advance about half way to the cave for our first night. Once again, we bought a through ticket which covered a variety of transport. We started at 10am and were supposed to arrive at 6.30pm. You can see where this is heading can't you? 

But first we had to get to our starting point by tuk tuk. How old do you think our driver is?

We then boarded a boat and, coincidentally, our Kiwi friends were on it for a short time. We were dropped back at the port where we came in (we didn't see the dead puppy this time) and walked a short distance, stopping at all the bus depots to find which one was ours. We tried to get cash out but the ATMs weren't working. This left us with only a little money to see us through the day.

We only waited about 15 minutes and our bus was ready to go. The seats on the bus were mostly broken and uncomfortable but we made good progress. The bus was going all the way to Vientiane, the capital city, dropping tourists off at various destinations along the way. We got to a town called Pakse, about a quarter of the distance we were going that day, where, to our surprise, they put John and I onto a different bus. We just accepted this as the way things are but we later realised that they had taken us off the fast bus and put us onto a slow, local one.

The new bus was an old Chinese tour bus. There was no mistaking it for another one!

They told us the bus would be leaving in 15 minutes. This wasn't long enough to get lunch so we shared a packet of Pringles chips. Of course, it was over an hour before this bus even left and then we stopped at all stations along the way. At what was probably around dinner time, we pulled into a "bus stop" where there were toilets and some basic food. We were very hungry by this stage and I spied some satay sticks grilling over a fire. Just as I was about to buy some, a lady came up selling fried rats on sticks! I looked at the rats and looked at the meat on the skewers. I couldn't tell the difference. We bought a small packet of biscuits instead.....

Just as the sun was setting, we pulled up behind another bus and they told us all to get onto the other bus. Both buses were only half full, so it made sense. We were crammed into the back seat and the drive went on and on. We were tired and hungry but at least we were making progress.

We think we worked out why they took us off the fast bus (we had plenty of time to think about it!). John and I were the only people going to Savannakhet and Savannakhet is about 30kms off the highway. They would have had to drive 30kms in and 30kms back just to drop us off. If we had understood this, we would have fought to stay on the fast bus and make our own way from the highway. They put us on the slow bus that would take us into the town, however they put us on that slow bus about five hours too early. They could have kept us on the fast bus until the turnoff, 30kms from our destination.

When that second bus bumped us onto the third bus though, that bus didn't go into the town either! So instead of arriving in the town at 6.30pm, we eventually arrived at the junction to the town at about 11pm! Needless to say, we were pretty peed off. We then made an on-the-spot decision to lose our money on our previously booked hotel and stay on the bus as there was no obvious way of getting from the highway into the town at 11pm. The next main town, about an hour up the road, was the safer option. We approached the only other tourists on the bus, a lovely Spanish couple, and found out they had a booking at a hotel in the next town. It was after midnight when we got there - we had left at 10am! - so we all hired a tuk tuk together. We woke the hotel manager up and he found us a room. It was very basic but we weren't fussy at that time of night.

Needless to say, by this stage we were saying to ourselves that this cave had better be bloody good to be worth all this hassle!

The next morning we boarded a songtaew, a combi van-sized vehicle with seats in the back. Ours is the songtaew in the middle.

The people in the songtaew weren't very communicative, with the exception of one little old lady who boarded for just for a short time. She said hello to us and tried to talk to us but our Laotian is extremely limited! She gave us plenty of gapped-tooth smiles. When she couldn't get answers from us she tried to talk to others on the vehicle but nobody responded. The Laotians seem far less extroverted than the Cambodians so far.

Finally, we turned off the main north-south highway and started driving though incredible karst country. Karsts are limestone formations that stick up spectacularly out of the ground.

After an hour or so we came to our last transport changeover. We were told in advance that our songtaew would probably change to another one here if there weren't enough people to go all the way through to the village where the cave is. We were fine with that until the driver of the second vehicle informed us it would leave in about 1.5 hours if enough people turned up by then! We had had enough. The guy said if we paid for the other seats he would leave now. We paid, much to the delight of a couple of Czech backpackers who were also waiting. They were interesting to talk to. 

The scenery along the way was amazing. Tobacco crops stood in a vivid green contrast to the karst mountains behind them.

I love the bamboo fences here.

We finally arrived at our accommodation in the afternoon, about 29 hours after we left the Four Thousand Islands. We immediately learned that the room we had booked was just a really simple hut with three shared bathrooms between 10 cabins. The walls were just woven bamboo strips and the rooms were only a metre or so apart so everyone could hear everyone else. We thought it was going to be terrible but, with the help of good earplugs, this turned out to be an amazing place to stay! The location alone made the gruelling trip worthwhile.

We started each morning here with a walk through the farmland surrounding a nearby karst outcrop. There are many light coloured water buffalo here.

Termites build their homes inside tree trunks. Food and protection in one!

Huts storing hay and rice scenically dotted the landscape.

The fences were in great condition and we loved this cute stile. (Sorry for the farmer talk. We'll always be rural at heart!)

This water buffalo made some weird noises. I managed to catch one of them on audio. It's definitely not what you'd expect! Turn your volume up and wait til near the end of the video.

Friendly locals.

Finally it was time to visit the cave! Tham Kong Lor is special in that it is over 7kms long and you can drive a boat through it! We were a few kms from the cave entrance so we hired a boat to take us there. This boat ride was awesome! The waters were smooth and we floated through some gorgeous scenery.

These cool red dragonflies were everywhere. 

These buildings are for drying tobacco. The rock formations on the river were cool but difficult to avoid at times!

We motored along on the shallow waters (it's dry season here) and had a unique insight into village life. Water buffalo lazed in the coolness.

No, this one isn't decapitated! It's just getting as cool as possible.

Kids seemed happy to see us.

The river is the lifeblood of many communities. Fishing is extremely important.

After about half an hour of river bliss, we arrived at the start of the cave. We swapped boats and the captain of the new boat led us into the cave where his boat was waiting.

Armed with nothing more than a headlamp each, we climbed into the boat and motored off into the dark! It was a weird sensation floating through the bowels of the earth with only a faint light to guide us.

There was one section that had interesting stalagmite and stalagtite formations. This was the only part of the cave that was lit up. We walked along this section.

The water was quite low in places and we had to get out and push the boat a couple of time. It was all such fun!

 At last, after over 7kms of darkness, there was literally light at the end of the tunnel!

The scenery at the other end of the cave was just as pretty. 

We stopped at a small village for a bit before returning back through the cave. The most entertaining part of the stop though was watching a motorbike-riding tourist try to take his motorbike through the cave by boat! They did it!

Getting the boat out of the cave at the other end proved to be quite a challenge!

Our 'resort' was very simple but was set in a gorgeous location. Raised walkways led us through the greenery.

The 'resort' had kayaks and we had some fun exploring nearby rivers. It was so peaceful floating on the clear water past the lush greenery that lined the rivers.

We weren't looking forward to the long songtaew and bus trip to Vientiane, the capital. On our last night at the 'resort', we were talking to two Belgian ladies and found out that they were hiring a car and driver to take them to Vientiane. We all had a bit of a chat and we decided to join them. It was such bliss to climb into a car and ride in comfort for the 6 hours or so to Vientiane!

There was an amazing viewpoint along the way.

The two Belgians were going in different directions so we dropped Laetitia off on the main highway as she was heading south. From left to right, John, me, Bindu and Laetitia.

There were food stalls here. I love their ingenious way of keeping flies off the food!

Hmm, I can't get the video to load properly. Here's a photo. It's not easy to see but they've hooked up a long pink wire to a motor that spins around. Bits of plastic are tied to the end of the wire and the spinning plastic makes a great flyswisher!

John tried the sausages there and said they were pretty darned good.

We had a great time chatting in the car with Bindu and the time passed quickly. We pulled into Vientiane, the capital, just as it got dark. We were dropped off right at our hotel where said goodbye to Bindu. We were so grateful we hadn't made that journey by public transport!

Til next time.
Heather and John