If teenagers ruled the world...

Now I am sitting in my hotel room in Hanoi and am uploading this post immediately after the previous one. It's nice to have decent bandwidth.

After leaving the homestay, we drove into the town of Veng Viene. Wikipedia describes the place really well. If teenagers ruled the world, they would design it like Veng Viene. Small and walk-able and along the Mekong river. You can float slowly on an inner tube down the river or rent a motor bike or bicycle to visit the nearby caves.

There are many cheap bars with lounge seating and looping episodes of ‘Friends’ or ‘Family Guy’ on the big-screen televisions.

After a nice lunch in the shade along the Mekong, we set out to hike out to a nearby hill and I had every intention of climbing it until after I paid my entrance fee and got about one-third of the way up. There are solidly-built bamboo ladders and bridges helping you over the more precarious bits but otherwise you are scrambling up over large rocks with a pretty impressive drop. They shut the entrance at night with barbed wire otherwise drunk tourists might attempt it. Apparently a couple of years ago 11 tourist died in Veng Viene because they tried to do some of the activities drunk.

 After the hill we hiked through the jungle to the Lusi cave and paid a tiny amount of money to one of the two sketchy-looking locals guarding the entrance. Armed with flashlights, we followed him up a short hill and into the limestone caves. He turned out to be a fantastic guide with good enough English and that great dirty sense of humour that we seem to be encountering a lot in Laos. He pointed out rock formations that looked like toilets, elephants, podiums, and many, many penises (Lao penises you understand). Anyway after about twenty minutes we turned around and came out to walk back through the jungle and fallow rice fields to come home.

Before going to dinner we bought a couple of BeerLao from the corner store and shared it while watching the sunset from our balcony.

That and the excellent barbequed fish I at for dinner made for a pretty good day.

The next morning we drove the four hours to the capital city of Vientiane and shared a minivan out to the Buddha Park. It was full of all kinds of statues both Hindu and Buddhist and was pretty spectacular to walk through. I just wish I knew more about what I was looking at.

This morning we took a tuk-tuk up to Pha That Luang which is a lovely and large gold-painted monument that is the most important national symbol in Laos. It is surrounded by lovely gardens and tourist go there by the busload. One of those tourists actually wanted to get a picture taken with us...in fact that also happened in Beijing. Kind of a surprise but whatever. Anyway, we then walked down past the Putaxai monument which is a Laos Arc de Triomphe and the story goes that they were given the concrete to build a new airport but instead they used it to buld a monument to the Lao who died in pre-revolutionary wars.

This afternoon we flew to Hanoi and managed to get our visas on arrival even though there was a mistake on my pre-approval letter. Turns out they barely read those things and just want the $45 US so I now have a nice Vietnamese visa to add to my collection. Better than landing jail in a communisty country. Anyway, Hanoi is an assault on the senses after Laos. In fact, it's crazy. It's batshit crazy. The traffic is gonzo and motorcyclist are EVERYWHERE and the stores are jammed together like pasts of Amsterdam...but with so so so much more chaos. I kind of like it.