March 1st – Day 23 – Vientiane to Luang Prabang

Once again a stay of only one night in a capital city is simply not long enough, and looking at the itinerary, the same happens in Hanoi. What is John Brown thinking about? Still, we had a chance to see one or two of the principal sights in the city as we drove out heading north to Luang Prabang.

We left the hotel at 9.45am and almost immediately saw the ancient chedi, That Dam.

The route then took us along Vientiane’s equivalent of the Champs Elysee, the Th Lan Xang.

At the end is the Patouxay Arch, the Laotian equivalent of the Arc de Triomphe.

We then drove a short distance to the magnificent That Luang stupa.

This is located next to the National Assembly building.

We were sorry to discover that the route did not include the fine old French colonial buildings we had wanted to see, as well as missing out on the Presidential Palace. By now the morning rush hour traffic made the drive out of the city pretty tedious, and for the first 50kms we were stuck in slow traffic. Once clear of the trucks we managed to speed up a bit and were promptly stopped by the police in a radar trap for doing 94kms/hr in an 80kms/hr zone. The policeman was very polite and smiled as he warned us to keep to the limit and then waved us on. We found out later that others had been stopped but, as I write this, I don’t know if anyone was ticketed.
We came across this rather dilapidated bridge, which is being replaced by a new one that they are building, and as we waited for vehicles to cross we saw this old Landrover parked on the side, being used as an advertising hording for adventure trekking and canoeing.


We came up behind this bus and the sign on the back caught our attention.

A typical local bus, overloaded with passengers and goods!


The drive took us through some beautiful scenery.

Many villages we went through had bustling markets and this one was by a large reservoir where the main livelihood, is fishing. All the stalls had smoked fish hanging from racks.


By now it was lunchtime, so we stopped by a river and had a snack. There were people fishing in the river, as well as children swimming. It was an idyllic spot.


Shortly after we had our lunch we saw this amazing sight on the side of the road. A small muddy pool that was filled to capacity with water buffalo, wallowing in the mud. I immediately thought of the Flanders and Swann song, ‘mud, mud, glorious mud’


We drove on up into the mountains of central Laos. Lovely winding roads took us through one village after another. Here are a few of the photos we took.

All along the road there were groups of people threshing fronds of grass and then rolling them up. They were all working so hard, even the children. We learned later that they were making brooms. They do this after the harvest is collected to supplement their income.

We came across large areas of ‘slash and burn’. It really is very depressing to see areas of this beautiful county being turned into a wasteland.


Finally, were these two on top getting a free ride? If so, as the bus nearly turned over going round this bend, I think they might pay next time!

The total drive today was just under 400kms, and we arrived in Luang Prabang just before 6pm, as the sun was setting. We are here for two nights, our last rest day.