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Vientiane and Southern Laos

Wednesday, April 5th, 2006

Vientiane, the capital of Laos is a quiet little town with good food and an easy going atmosphere. It hardly feels like a capital city; the tallest building in town is a newly constructed luxury hotel. We spent our days visiting numerous wats, admiring a bit of remaining French colonial architecture, munching on croissants, baguettes and the infamous noodle soups and taking care of our Cambodian visa.  It hardly has the old time feel of Luang Prabang, as the city was raised by the Siamese in the 20th century, and all of the temples except Wat Sisaket (it was the Siamese headquarters) were destroyed.    But it is a good place to get feel for the history and spirt of Laos. We marveled at the communist propaganda in the National Museum, notably denouncing the French slave drivers and the American Imperialists, the Victory Monument (a hideous Laotian interpretation of the Arc de Triomphe) which was built using concrete Americans sent to build an airport, and That Lang, a large gold-colored stupa, that is the symbol of Laos and appears on all of the Laotian currency.  From the bank of the Mekong we could see Thailand, and we were impressed to see that the fertile river bottom (left exposed in the dry season) was being utilized for agriculture. 

From Vientiane, we took an overnight bus (luxury liner) to Pakse in the south, where we caught a connection to the Bolaven Plateau. The Bolaven Plateau is famous for coffee plantations (the French introduced coffee production to Laos, and now they produce some of the world’s finest coffee, though I never got used to their style of drinking it- with super rich condensed milk.)  The climate (like most of Laos) is excellent for agriculture and they also grow a lot of bananas, pineapples and rubber trees.  We stayed at the Tadlo waterfalls in a rustic little bungalow near the river.  The owners were fantastic and gave us free fruit salad and pineapple fruit shakes. We took a a tour on motorbikes to some surrounding tribal villages, the coffee plantations and another waterall.  After Tadlo Falls, we headed to Champassak to visit Wat Phu, a temple dedicated to Shiva, and built in the Khmer style (linked with Angkor Wat and other Khmer temples.) The site was chosen because of the natural lingum, or phallus (if you don’t know what that means, pull out your Webster’s dictionary) that appears on the hill behind hit.
From Champassak, we went to Si Phan Don (4,000 islands), where we made Don Det (Det Island) our last offical stop in Laos.  The island was connected by a railroad bridge to Don Khone, another small island, popular for tourism.  The French built a railroad at the beginning of last century, across the two islands, to transport good brought on barges from Saigon to Vientiane.  This stretch of the river is unnavigable, with dangerous rapids and enormous waterfalls (the largest in Laos.)  The waterfalls (Samphamit Falls and the larger Khong Phabeng Falls) were extremely impressive, a series of towering falls with a thundering flow of water (no rock jumping here.) We also took a longtail boat to see the endangered Irrawaddy river dolphins. They inhabit an area of the river near the Cambodian border (depth 300m- 900ft), and we were able to see many from a far. A nice quiet ending to our stay in Laos, before making an adventurous border crossing into Cambodia via a semi-official border.