Escaping Laos

Vang Vieng, Laos

Escaping Laos, and Vang Vieng in particular, is proving to be an impossible exercise. Its like once you arrive in this country, you become physically incapable of leaving. I wouldn't be surprised if all around the borders of this country are invisible force-fields preventing people from just hopping the border from one country to the next, forcing you to go through one of five ''checkpoints'' that are really just temporary gaps in the nexus of anti-leaving that this country propogates to prevent the financially empowered tourists from leaving when they actually want to.

But we've managed to find our own little nexus gap, and will be leaving for Bangkok tomorrow at 1pm.

On a bus.

On a seventeen hour long bus.

Believe me, we tried to do it some other way, but this was the only way we could get out of the country in the time frame we were looking for. I stand by my theory that you can't escape Vang Vieng even if you wanted to; we left down to Vientiene (4 hours), then went to Phonsavanah (12 hours), then came back to Vang Vieng (10 hours) because the prospect of spending ANOTHER night in Vientiene (the most boring city on the planet) hurt us more than the prospect of spending another night in the party capital of the universe.

But we're sucking it up, and soon we'll be back home in Thailand, where all of these crazy adventures started. It's been so long I'm afraid I'll forget what Bangkok looks like.

Oh, wait, nope, there's the mental image of the insane tuktuk driver surrounded by smog and lots of cars. I'm ok.

The plain of jars at Phonsavanh wasn't what we were expecting; we were literally expecting this massive plain with soft rolling hills covered in huge fuckoff shiny jars, and in the end we got a few concentrated spots of old big jars lying here and there in the middle of what could have passed as the Australian countryside. I'd show you photos, but I'm lazy today.

So it was an interesting way to kill three days. I think the place is designed as a passing through point between Vietnam and Vientiene; "oh, well, since we're in the area, lets check it out" rather than "Dude! Lets go there!" My bad!

We're off for a hopefully quiet night in Vang Vieng. Wish us all the luck in the world, we'll need it.