Where we’ve been the last week.

Vientiene
Another long bus ride to Vientiene, the Capital of Laos, from Luang Prabang. This time we opted for a more comfortable bus, the price of our bus ticket included: A/C; reclining seats; bottled water; snacks; DVD video entertainment and….an armed escort. Quite shocking seeing this bare chested, bandana wearing Laotian guy boarding our bus with a rifle hung on his shoulder….just kidding only the rifle part is true. Apparently Route 13 between Vang Vieng (2 hrs. from Vientiene) and Vientiene has had a history of buses being ambushed, we assume Rambo was on board to protect us or perhaps it’s very common in Laos to have gun weilding passengers. Well no ambush during our bus ride, I believe the last Route 13 attack happened 2 years ago.
-
We’re surprised how expensive everything is in Southern Laos, well relative to SE Asia, lodging, food and transportation is easily double the cost of Thailand or Vietnam. Not too many Laotian restaurants in Vientiene, too many western restaurants serving up pizza, burgers etc. mainly catering to the younger backpacker crowd. We rented a motorbike one day, checked out the notable sites in and around Vientiene then continued our journey down south. Vientiene not our type of town. Luang Prabang was much nicer, we miss the delicious Northern Lao cuisine up there.

Si Phan Don
The Four Thousand Islands of Laos, we stayed on the Island of Done Khone. Accomodations were at the Floating Hotel, our backdoor led us directly to the Mekong River. Quite nice for a couple of days, but not worth the price we paid, the staff were such lazy sacks of shits.
-
We’re now in Pakse, which is only an 1 1/2 hour bus ride to the Thai border. We were contemplating visiting the nearby Wat Phu temples tomorrow, but we’ll most likely head back to civilized Thailand eventually making our way back to Bangkok. We’re tired of being priced gouged in Southern Laos. We fly to Myanmar (Burma) next week.

Ciao folks