12th January: Vientiane, Laos
I took the owner’s advice and tried Vietnamese noodles for breakfast. What this turned out to be was instant noodles with a hotdog sausage chopped into it and a fried egg on top! I decided to eat the noodles and, for the first time in 7 or 8 years, the egg, and didn’t regret it. The sausage on the other hand stayed in the broth!
Vientiane was a ghost town early on a Sunday morning. I guess Sunday closures are taken seriously here! Perhaps it’s the French connection? I had a job to find coffee but eventually found one open stand offering a ‘soymilk coffee’, which I watched them then make using condensed milk from a can. I did, however, enjoy watching just about the only activity which was happening. A bank was going to have a car in its lobby for some kind of prize or publicity stunt. There was one issue though. There lobby was at the top of about 15 or so stairs! No problem for the three guys working on it, who drove the car onto a tow truck and then the tow truck onto a bigger tow truck. I left, sweet milky coffee in hand, when all three of them were simultaneously driving a vehicle each as they tried to manoeuvre the three-tiered contraption back towards the stairs.
Laos has a sad recent history and this morning we learnt more at COPE, the Co-operative Orthotic and Prosthetic Enterprise, on the eastern fringes of Vientiane. From 1964 – 1973, the United States of America bombed huge swathes of the country with disgusting cluster bombs in a claimed attempt to destroy North Vietnamese supply routes. Astonishingly, a plane load of bombs was dropped every 8 minutes for 9 years on Laos. Not to mention the immediate casualties, 80 million of these ‘bombies’ did not detonate instantly and have been plaguing the civilian population ever since. Many of these tennis ball sized explosives detonate when disturbed during crop planting or picked up by children. An estimated 15,000 Laotian’s are amputees as a result and COPE exists to rehabilitate people and give them some sense of freedom through prosthetics. Even this fantastic organisation can only treat approximately 1,000 people per year, so many do not receive the treatment they desperately need. There are international assistance programs to clear areas of bombs, but it is slow progress and life in many areas is still risky. We both felt a strong sense of upset and also anger towards the USA once again, both for the initial atrocities and the lack of funding provided to even begin to make amends.
Nearby, we found an Egyptian place for lunch but regretted the cost of the meal. The moussaka, falafel wrap and the mango and dragon fruit smoothies picked up nearby were nice enough, but Southeast Asia in general is as not as cheap as we expected! Our spend so far in Laos and the accommodation we’ve pre-booked in Thailand and Cambodia has been well above what we anticipated. The accommodation is 1.5 to 2x China prices for similar rooms, although transport here is much cheaper. The pound also seems to have plummeted recently, meaning our daily costs are around £5 more than they would’ve been.
I decided not to go to football in the afternoon. Buses seem unreliable to the out of city stadium and finish running early. I could’ve easily gotten stuck there and stung for a very expensive tuktuk back given there would be no other option. 14km is just too far to walk back in the dark on a main road. As it happened, the game was moved from the National Stadium to a reserve pitch, so I’m glad that I didn’t make the effort.
Instead, I tried to get a bit of tan on my pasty legs on the balcony. Later, we watched the sunset with the smell of barbecue wafting up from the street below and hundreds of birds flying back to their roosts. Today’s scattered high clouds made for a spectacular orange glow. For a relaxing dinner option, we went to the local restaurant again. My ginger tofu casserole was delicious with an umami but sweet sauce and lots of crunchy mushrooms and Kaja’s noodles were good too. We also seem to be back in the realm of knives and forks!
