Travel tales on our way to Vientiane - the most relaxed capital ever

From the 4000 islands (Manuj, you're quite right - there're not really 4000 islands there) we have headed headed on further north. We left our guesthouse at 5.30 in the morning to catch the 6 am bus, which ended up being a nice truck driver about 1.5 hours later, who offered us a lift to the ferry, where we finally got on the pretty much delayed morning bus.

At some point we gave up counting the number of people/ creatures on board the bus. Glad there's no bird flu wave at the moment. Just one comment - it was nice to be stretching our legs again, once we got to our stop a couple of hours later. We were also pretty glad that the woman who bought a grilled rat on a skewer decided that the fried fish she had bought earlier was filling enough and just packed the rat in a plastic bag to enjoy at home - yummy - for some reason we have still not quite managed to enjoy the full range of Lao cuisine.

After a small detour to Champassak - a UN world heritage site, which dates back even earlier than the Khmer temples of Angkor we have moved on to Vientiane, the capital of Laos. Our small stay in Champassak was pretty exhausting - it was very hot - no shade and the temple was using the form of the mountain, i.e. we had to climb pretty high up to get to the top.

Back in Pakse we had already arranged for bus tickets to Vientiane - once again we were amazed by the helpfulness of people. When our tuk tuk driver had just dropped us at the supposedly correct bus terminal - a guy from the tourist office, where we had earlier bought the tickets, was already there to show us to the correct bus terminal - amazing! Guess he already knew we'd have trouble to get to the terminal with our limited Lao language skills :-)

10 hours later on our overnight bus we finally arrived in Vientiane.

We have seldom spent time in a captial, that has been more relaxed than this town. After a couple of hours of touring around on our bikes we already felt very much at home.

While riding our bikes we - at some point - felt like being in Paris - there's an Arch de Triomphe and even a street leading from there to the Presidential Palace that very much resembles the Champs Elysees - Lao style.

Pha Tat Luang most important national monument of Laos.

Since we already saw quite a few temples in Vientiane - our last temple stop off the day was to Wat Sok Pa Luang - literally translated forest temple, where we enjoyed an hour long traditional Lao massage - without having seen the temple before :-)