Nice hotels = nice breakfasts.

The place where we are staying definitely fits that equation.

I do like a good buffet big-hotel type of breakfast, but on this occasion there is a small offering set out for self-service (pastries, toast, fruit, noodles) and then you choose the hot dish you want from an a-la-carte menu. I chose Eggs Benedict with Smoked Salmon (how could I not!) and Dave chose pancakes and fried eggs. If I could find the post from a couple of years ago about this breakfast choice that Dave calls a ‘Sailors Breakfast’, I would put a link in here.  But needless to say it’s a favourite of Dave’s. This time, the order got a bit lost in translation and so he got two breakfasts – one of fried eggs and the other pancakes with chocolate sauce and fresh fruit.  He was not unhappy 😉

Even though it is extremely hot in Vientiane, the lovely thing is that it cools down at night, unlike the constant hot temperatures we had day and night in Phuket. Today’s maximum was expected to be 38C but was only about 20C when we woke up, so we thought a walk around the city in the cool of the morning was a good idea.

We set off along the river-side, then after about 1/2 km we ventured inland towards the central business district. Vientiane is definitely not an affluent city, though our research shows a significant increase in economic prosperity over the past decade. Hence we saw many contrasts; high rise modern shopping malls, broken cobbled pathways, an Apple stores on one corner, then small basic roadside food vendors with no refrigeration and broken appliances on the other. Expensive European sedans alongside oft-repaired 20+ year-old motorcycles.

What is consistent here in Laos is the happiness of the people. Without exception everyone has been very kind, courteous, happy to help and best of all every person we have come across has been cheerful and smiling.  We stopped mid-way through our morning walk for a cold drink – total cost of a soda water and a orange juice, with ice, just A$3 – served to the table by a extremely polite young man who was doing his very best to speak English, even offering us the private Wi-Fi code!

(first photo is our hotel, we are on 4th floor)

In the afternoon, we booked a car and driver for a couple of hours for a ‘city tour’. (A$40) We saw some of the city’s main attractions including:

1. Pha That Luang: A sacred monument and one of Laos’ most impressive religious structures, built in the 3rd century,
2. The Presidential Palace (Communism is alive and well here by the way),
3. Ho Phra Keo: a Buddhist shrine dating back to 1565,
4. The Laotian version of the Arc-de-Triomphe, the  ‘Patuxai Victory Gate’, a massive concrete arch which you can climb for a view (well you could if it wasn’t 38C!),
5. The Cooperative Orthotic and Prosthetic Enterprise (COPE) headquarters. COPE is a charity organisation that provides treatment and rehabilitation programs (including prosthetics) for Laotian people with physical disabilities, most of which are caused by hidden explosives scattered throughout the countryside as a result of the Vietnam War,
6. The Peoples Public Security Museum (Police museum).

A few pics of our ‘city tour’:

 (Aunty Bub, if you are reading this – we just took our hats off for the photos 😉 )

By the time we got back to the hotel, the sun was in full heat mode and it was approaching 40C.  Although I was keen to get to the room and into a cool shower, the bar in the lobby enticed with an offer of 2for1 cocktails, and at $10 full price, how could I resist 😉 I drank down two (small) Mojitos probably a little faster than I should have, and we headed to the room to shower and get ready for dinner.

Our stay here included one dinner for two, so we thought after the big day that might be the simplest thing to do. The hotel has restaurant tables in both the lobby and at the roof top bar, so given the evening was starting to cool down, we decided on the latter. The view from our table on the edge of the roof top balcony was stunning, especially at sunset.

Dinner was a traditional Laotian spread where multiple dishes were placed on the table for us to share. Unfortunately there was no menu so I’m not sure exactly what we ate. It did include two types of sticky rice, a flavoursome beef dish which Dave particularly enjoyed, (very) spicy noodles, a delicious dill infused fish curry and a spiced chicken sausage. There were also various condiments, fresh herbs and vegetables, and green leaves to wrap the food in. Yummo!

From the rooftop we could see the colourful and bright lights of the night market further downstream on the banks of the Mekong River. We decided another walk wouldn’t hurt us, and while the lights seemed far away, it only took about 20 minutes to walk there. There were hundreds of stalls selling a vast array of goods from electronics (I got you a $3 watch, Will!) to T-shirts, underwear, jewellery and many, many shoe stalls. Going by the prices I assume there wasn’t a genuine item amongst them! Carnival rides and sideshows lined the river-side of the market, and the street side had copious food stalls selling all sorts of wonderful smelling savoury and sweet dishes. We diverted into the CBD to get a night-time feel for the city, which had a really up-beat ambiance with lots of people walking around, eating out, singing karaoke, having coffee and generally enjoying themselves. No typical pushy vendors or dodgy vagrants hanging about as some other Asian cities do. Miraculously we managed to not get lost retracing our steps back to the hotel and racking up 14,000 steps on such a hot day was not a bad effort either!