Our First Proper Day In Vientiane…..Buddha Park.

After a fairly lazy afternoon/evening the day before (because we were still feeling ropey) we thought we had actually get off our asses and achieve something today. Luckily for us we have complimentary breakfast with our room, which is good seen as it is the most expensive room we have paid out for so far at 650 Kip each (around £6). The breakfast is pretty standard, consisting of a choice of omelette, fried eggs or scrambled eggs (if you don’t like egg you’re screwed) and a baguette, with as much tea, coffee and water as you want.

Needless to say in Thomo’s condition he was on the toilet within 5 minutes of finishing up, just what you want to hear after eating your breakfast, a beak faced sparrow legged sweating guy releasing his life into the toilet. So a quick refresh later we got ourselves out to meet our Dutch friends Linda & Babette who are actually just staying 30m down the road from us, and we investigated some prices to get to Buddha Park. Having been told it was going to cost us 6,000 Kip each (60p) and then discovering it cost 50,000 each (around £5) it was a bit of a shock, but then again it’s a 40 minutes drive down the road and 40 minutes back, so £2.50 each way. Trying doing that in a taxi anywhere in England. It costs the same price to take a tuk tuk as it does to go in an air conditioned minivan, so when you consider Buddha Park is around 25km from Vientiane, on what could be described as egregious roads, the minivan is defiantly the way forward.

Located near the Mekong River, the park constitutes a vast number of statues, depicting various religious happenings. It could be quite hard to describe some of these as there are statues of Buddha among statues of pig headed figures and giant beetles being head back by ropes. The creepiest thing we saw was inside a giant spherical sculpture/building, which consisted of a demon or monster faced entrance (you walk through the mouth) leading to 3 levels of statues. The bottom floor, which is only accessible by going down the stairs of the first floor, contained some really weird stuff. There were statues of ancient figures killing, maiming and beheading children, which you can agree is pretty warped, along with a statue which bares and uncanny resemblance to an alien (we have a photo of this). A great feature of this building is that you can get right to the top and look out over the park, but beware for all you pigeon footed people, the steps in this place are sketchy and it’s dark.

The statues throughout the park are of varying quality, but their eerie nature and fascinating depictions makes this place a must see, although the time needed is no more than an hour tops.

From here we returned to what we believe to be the centre of Vientiane (we are still unsure due to our lack of map) for lunch. As we had some great food the night before we took the girls to the same place for lunch, unfortunately I didn’t catch the name of it but I can tell you it was under a big yellow sign opposite the park (you can find it, I know you can). Again they didn’t disappoint.

That’s about as far as we have come with Vientiane, we have a V.I.P bus (once you are hear you will realise that isn’t as great as it sounds) to Bangkok tomorrow evening as we start our journey down to Koh Phi Phi (yes we erratically change our plans) and so hopefully we will get out tomorrow afternoon and see some more.

 

Love Scotty x