The Capital of Slow
Trip Start
Apr 07, 2012
1
13
19
Trip End
Ongoing
Vientiane, Lao Peoples Dem Rep
Thursday, April 26, 2012
We took a 20,000 kip (2.50 USD) tuc-tuc ride into Vientiane center, accompanied by a weird but nice Australian guy, a Buddhist monk in orange robes and some locals. There were some good paved roads, but the city was small and dusty. Although Vientiane is the capital city of Laos and located on the Mekong River, it was small, kind of dead and the river was all dried up all the across to Thailand. The city seemed like an old cowboy town, not a lot of people, really slow-paced lifestyle, and everything seemed to open at 9 or 10 in the morning and close at 7 or 8 at night. Almost always in Laos, when you go to a restaurant and order something – it could be something you don't even have to cook like yogurt and granola – and it would be thirty minutes to an hour before it arrived at your table. It’s like no matter what, there is always only one cook in the kitchen, and even he is always taking it slow and taking breaks often. No locals seem to mind, but for us it definitely would have transitioned between new and interesting to inconvenient and frustrating pretty quickly.
We stayed in the Youth Inn 1 on Francois Ngin Rd., close to the "river" for 80,000 kip (5 USD per person) 30,000 kip extra in order to get A/C. The food in Laos was underwhelming, the Papaya salad was plain and not very fruity papaya, even though we heard so many recommendations for it before, but hopefully Thailand’s will be better. All the street food looked really stale and like meat that we really didn’t want to test our bodies with.
