Vientiane

I thought Vientiane was a very cool place. It doesn't have too much in the way of tourist sights, but it's a great place for walking around and has the best food for your dollar anywhere. When we arrived in Vientiane (pronounced WienChan, the French transliteration is very misleading) on the bus from Vang Vieng, they dropped us in the middle of town and we stumbled around until we found a room. Many places were full because lots of western tourists had the same idea of spending christmas in the capitol. We checked into a guesthouse, and Angela wasn't feeling well, so I went out exploring a bit. I ended up finding a very nice place, the Vayakorn Guesthouse, where we could check in the next day. On our first full day, I thought we could get a taste of the city by walking through some of it. So we took a tuktuk to the Pha That Luang, and after taking it in, we walked back down Ave Lan Sang to the riverfront. In the afternoon we walked through Wat Si Saket before visiting Haw Pha Kaew. Being a sixteenth-century temple, the building was quite impressive, with beautiful buddhas and reliefs. Inside was a rather disappointing collection of small artifacts and buddha statues. On christmas eve, we visited the buddha park south of town, and soaked in a gorgeous sunset on the river. On christmas, we wandered around town through the markets and Wat That Foun, basically just killing time until the evening when we boarded an overnight sleeper bus bound for Pakse in the far south of the country.