October 22-24: Vientiane, Lao (By Jeff)

It was a mere 1 hour flight from Hanoi and we arrived in Vientiane, the capital city of Laos. Unfortunately we had heard from several people that there was not much to do in the city other than fly in and out of it. However, this was not the case for the 1 weekend of the year that we happened to be visiting. Each year there is a festival to celebrate the end of Buddhist lent that lasts a few days where they expect over 500,000 people to show up from all over the country. Being completely oblivious to the fact this was going on, we were caught off guard when we first approached the main street where everything was happening our first night. We walked around for some time on the street market and were overwhelmed by the sea of people going in every direction. I tried one of the sucker carnival games where I had to throw a dart at a balloon and pop it to win a prize. Sounds easy enough right? After making an ass of myself and missing everything my first 2 throws I went for a power third throw where I extended my arm too far and caught my hand on a bowl of candies in my follow through and raked them all on to the ground at my feet. It was really embarrassing, but Liz at least got a good laugh out of it as well as other locals. To top it off, I still missed the balloons after my big windup throw. We continued walking until we decided we wanted to stop and sample a bit of local cuisine from a makeshift restaurant made of plastic tables and chairs on the street. No one at the restaurant spoke a word of English and our Lao was rusty so we pointed to a bucket of what we thought were hard boiled eggs and 2 beers to make it simple enough. Once the eggs were brought over we cracked them and instantly realized we made a mistake. Liz had read that they serve embryo eggs out here as a delicacy rather than just a regular hard-boiled egg, and that was the case here. It was a disgusting site seeing a chicken embryo in the food we were expected to eat so we quickly lost our appetite. We did our best to conceal the fact that we did not eat a single nibble out of it, but I’m sure it looked pretty obvious. The table beside us ordered a bucket of the eggs and were chowing down on them like there was no tomorrow to add insult to injury. We found dinner some time after at a French restaurant to revert back to something we were sure we would like, and avoid any further adventurous behavior for the night.


Embryo eggs...

The following day we started the morning off at a Scandinavian bakery which was delicious. They had bagels and cream cheese which Liz had been especially craving for months now amongst other things like sandwiches, muffins, and desserts so we were content. Upon finishing up the breakfast a pair familiar faces passed our table: it was one of the couples from Sacramento that we met on Phu Quoc Island. We were very surprised since it had been a couple weeks when we had seen them in a different country, adding to our list of small world occurrences. We chatted with them for a bit and recalled their saying that the husband, Tui, had family still living in Laos and they were there for a visit. They also mentioned that the next day there was the huge boat races throughout the day which is the main event that everyone from all over comes to see. At that point our bus was leaving in a few hours, but we hurried back to switch it to the next day so we could catch a glimpse of one of the biggest days of the year in Laos. We managed to change the tickets and then went out walking around the city for a while trying to find a travel agent to book our next flight (travel agents get much better deals than buying it yourself online) and stop off at a Wat along the way. That evening we headed out to the festival again where that night was supposed to be a river ceremony. Thousands of people buy handmade banana leaf boats made with various flowers and candles, light them, and place them in the river to float down. They had a very similar ceremony when we were in Udaipur, India but there were thousands more people out to take part in this celebration. We learned that by placing one of these boats in the river that one was washing away their fears and bad karma while giving oneself good luck. In addition, people light candles beneath large white paper bags and after a certain level of heat is contained they will take off floating like a hot air balloon. It was an amazing site to see hundreds of these lantern balloons flying as well as the endless flow of banana leaf boats floating down the river simultaneously. That evening we had some traditional Lao food at a restaurant overlooking the whole street market and river while enjoying some quality Beer Lao (creative name). On our walk home we ran into our friends, Patty and Tui, again and said our goodbyes because we knew that it was going to be our last unplanned encounter.


Our offering that we put into the river



The next morning we were off on our brief 3 hour bus ride in the “VIP” bus to Vang Vieng. Just to be clear, there was absolutely nothing about this bus that was VIP, but rather it was a disgustingly dirty, no AC, shocks and windows broken, and all around disaster of a bus. Nonetheless, it took us to take Vang Vieng.