A three hour bus trip through the attractive bamboo and tea countryside of Anhui province brought us back to the pleasant city of Hangzhou where we stayed for a couple of nights before flying on to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia to meet our friends Susan and Chris who had just arrived from Adelaide. We stayed two nights in KL, spending a day walking around the city centre and on Saturday we were up bright and early and back at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport at 6am. Then it happened.WE WUZ ROBBED! Our small carry bag containing our laptop computer and unusually cash was out of our sight for maybe five seconds while we put our backpacks onto the airport x-ray unit conveyor. But that was long enough for an unseen person to snatch the bag from the trolley and melt back into the throng. We reported the theft to the police but they weren't surprised, saying there was a syndicate of thieves working the airport and that such thefts were unfortunately very common. While we were in the station a man came in with an opened bag he had found lying on the ground. Very likely another victim's bag. Fortunately we had removed our passports from our bag before entering the airport.
Having learned a painful and expensive lesson not to drop your guard for even an instant, we boarded our Air Asia flight and two and a half hours later arrived in Vientiane, the capital city of Laos where I had several hours of work ahead of me phoning banks in Australia and changing a myriad of internet passwords. And it's also back to internet cafes for me for the remainder of the trip!
Vientiane (Lao for "Sandalwood City") is a laid-back national capital with a population of only 300,000. We checked into the Riverside Hotel on the banks of the Mekong River and spent two pleasant days walking and riding on tuk tuks around town. Buddhism is big in Laos and there seemed to be an impressive temple on every second street. The best we saw was Wat Si Saket, built in 1820 and the only one in the city to survive the 1828 Siamese sacking. It contains more than 2,000 silver and ceramic Buddhas. We also visited golden Pha That Luang, Laos' national monument, destroyed in the Siamese invasion of 1828 and rebuilt by the French in the early 1900s. There's a visible French influence throughout Vientiane, including welcomingly in the city's cafe scene that we found time to be part of to sample the excellent pastries and coffees on offer. And of course the members of our party found plenty of time for shopping.
On Sunday night at sunset we walked amongst the cafe tables set out along the banks of the Mekong River. The riverside here is bare dirt and dusty and not particularly attractive - there's certainly a big potential to improve this part of town. But this was also where we saw the best sight of our time in Vientiane. A candle-lit Buddhist ceremony was underway at a temple just across the road from the river bank and hundreds of people dressed in white were seated in the temple grounds, stringing up interconnecting white threads between the buildings. Every so often there were some words from the monks followed by Buddhist music. It was an exotic and atmospheric occasion and we stopped to watch and listen for awhile before making our way to La Gondola for our final dinner in Vientiane.
