Welcome to our travel blog. We are Tabitha and Nic. In 2011 we 'retired' in our early 40s and set off to travel the world. We spent our first year in South America and have been lucky enough to make two trips to Antarctica.

Our blog is a record of our travels, thoughts and experiences. It is not a guide book, but we do include some tips and information, so we hope that you may find it useful if you are planning to visit somewhere we have been. Or you may just find it interesting as a bit of armchair travel.



Sunday, November 6, 2016

Vientiane

We sometimes find that, as we get to the end of a long trip, we wind down - perhaps a bit too much. We found that a bit here in Vientiane. Whilst we still had about a month left of our time away, the next places were either with family or friends, or in the Middle East on the way back, so this felt like the last stop on our main trip.

It may be that our general disaffection with Laos made it worse this time, but we found ourselves feeling rather lacklustre. It is a shame, because of the four places we visited, the capital was probably potentially the most 'real' Laos experience - albeit of course a city one.

The lack of photos - I don't know what happened to the ones I took - doesn't mean we didn't do anything at all, but we only really pootled around, close to the centre. We had planned to take a bus out to the sculpture park, which looked fascinating, but lousy weather put paid to that, and certainly we did spend quite a bit of time dodging the rain here.

We wandered around a few temples, took a look at a monument or two and found a few shops to look in. We also visited the market, but that was a little disappointing, with predominantly lots of western clothes and phone cases.

Aside from that, we sheltered from the rain in a few nice cafes, and had some tasty evening meals at mostly western style restaurants; Pimenton was a decent steakhouse, and there was a perfectly acceptable Japanese place in the same street.

Overall, I suspect that Vientiane merits another visit sometime.

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