Mar 23-24 - Vientiane - So to be honest, this was a couple of days of not doing much! We wandered the streets of Vientiane like real tourists, just browsing in the shops and restaurants. Sunday morning was a late start ... I think we only got out of bed at about 11AM, and we grabbed a couple of books at the local bookstore before finding a cafe for a leisurely brunch, and then setting off to peruse the shops.

I found a brilliant little tailor on a street close to our hotel. I've got a favourite shirt that I really like, and they promised to make me three copies, in different materials, for about ten bucks each. The shops here are definately catering to tourists and ex-pats, but they have got some fantastic stuff. The range of textiles is quite amazing, and you've got to wonder how all these really complex weaving techniques developed over time, some of them are really elaborate and seem to take ages. The food scene here in Vientiane is also really good, with almost every type of cusine you can imagine; you can get a really great meal here (Lao, French or Italian) for between $2-10, including drinks. Even though we'd only just finished brunch, we stopped for lunch at a little place called Sticky Fingers ... definitely go there if you're in Vientiane, and have the lamb souvlaki, it's unbelievably good!

After lunch, we headed out to the main local market, Talat Sao. I was hoping that I could replace my camera, which I'd dropped down the waterfall in Don Det, like a total muppet. Talat Sao is a huge, sprawling complex on the eastern side of town - it's a four storey building, with shops inside, and lines and lines of stalls outside, covering a huge area around the central building. As we walked through the door, we were overwhelmed with a blast of electric guitar. They had a bandstand set up in the middle of the centre, with a local band; four young Lao rock-chicks playing away for all they were worth. These little impromptu bands are a common sight here, playing Bon Jovi covers and electric versions of traditional Lao songs with equal ease. The Lao youth seem to have embraced modern music and film with both arms - although we didn't see it, there's apparently also a cinema here, where the owner translates the soundtrack into Lao himself, and then employs two men and two women to voice-over each and every performance live, because he doesn't want the soundtrack to get out of kilter!

Anyway, Talat Sao has just about everything you could imagine. There are electrical goods, houshold goods - even little stalls selling the full range of 'Garnier' and 'L'Oreal' beauty products, which have got to be counterfeit knock-offs, given that everything retails for the equivalent of a couple of dollars. It's amazing how closely these copies can be manufactured to imitate the real thing, and it's only occasionally that you'll read the labelling, where some poorly transcribed instructions or ingredient list will give the game away. We saw some 'Nestle' condensed milk which promised 'Good healthy for Yours Baby!!'. There were also stalls of bike spares, jewellery, and probably ten or twenty selling every kind of new and secondhand mobile phone; which is the must-have accessory in Laos. There was actually a stall selling nothing but iPods and iPhones, and openly advertising network cracking for all versions of the iPhone software. Unfortunately ... not much in the camera department; heaps of little compact cameras, and a few old secondhand SLRs, but I pretty much resigned myself to doing without a new camera until Thailand. We wandered around the slow-motion mayhem for a while, taking in that peculiar Lao phenomenon, where things can be busy and slow at the same time, and then walked out to head back to our hotel.

On the way back, we walked past the Patuxai, which is Laos' answer to l'Arc de Triomphe. It's basically what you would get if a communist-era Soviet architect was asked to knock off France's famous victory memorial, using only concrete and cement (it fact, I think that's pretty much what happened.) It's not ugly per-se, but it just looks a bit incongruous. The monument is nick-named the 'Vertical Runway', because the planners commandeered a whole lot of US-donated cement which was provided for the expansion of Vientiane's airport in the sixties, and there's probably a few good metaphors of recent Lao history just in the construction of that single structure.

We ambled around a bit more, and watched the sun go down over the Mekong river, as the night vendors came out to cry their wares. We headed off to the hotel to shower and change, and then went next door to the Bor Pen Yang roof bar. This was a sort of nightclub/restaurant that tried to cater to every possible taste. It has Champions League Football, pool tables, two dancefloors playing eighties and techno respectively, and bar tables overlooking the city. THe food was actually pretty good, but there was all kinds of odd stuff going down - let's just say the clientele was colourful, and leave it at that! There was a huge sign up saying "Open late! 11:45", and sure enough, just as things were getting into full swing on the dancefloor, the lights came on, the music was switched off, and everyone had to shuffle out quietly - I think it's probably almost impossible to have a late night in Vientiane, and difficult anywhere in Laos.

The next day, we got up and headed to Green Discovery, a local travel company, to try and organise some trekking. We looked through the options, and eventually decided to go out to the Nam Leuk NPA, which was just north of Vientiane. This was a three-day trip which give us the chance to get away from the cities for a bit, and stretch our legs. We arranged to leave at about eight the next morning, and then headed off into the city.

We were walking past the national stadium, which is dotted with sporting clubs for different disciplines - tennis, swimming, shooting, etc. We read in the Lonely Planet that the shooting range was open to the public, so we popped in to have a look. It was a real step back in time. They had a pristine whitewashed building, with running targets that go out to fifty metres. There was a range of old, heavily used guns; some from the American War (Colt .45s, etc), and some old 9mm German Lugers that dated back to WW II at least! The club was run by three young sisters in their early twenties, and it was quite a trip. There was definately something of a bygone era about the place; they'd show you to your bay, and then bring your pistol and ammunition out on a silver tray, resting on a velvet cushion. Anyway, it was actually quite fun to pop away at some targets, and it seemed to be a popular place with the locals. It was a bit wierd to see some of them ordering beers in between their rounds, but I guess every place has got it's own idea of what's normal, and what's not. Like many things in Laos, it would be a great exercise in perspective for some of our Health and Safety zealots in the West!

After lunch on the Mekong, on one the food vendors' bamboo platforms, we walked up to a local weaving set up, run by an American weaver called Carol Cassidy. She's been in Laos for twenty years, and showed a group of us around her setup, where she now has fifty local women who've been trained up to weave. The things they produce are incredibly beautiful. Some of the designs are hand-woven into a loose template, which is then fed through the loom as a sort of carbon copy, to help the weavers stitch in all right threads in the right places. It takes them at least six months to become proficient at even the simplest designs, and some of the complicated pieces take months to finish. Watching them work was like watching a concert pianist - it's a real skill; almost like they've learnt a language that no-one else can speak. Thousands of little threads led into and out of the looms, and they quietly drove it with hands and feet, raising a soft clatter of bamboo; the finished textile just seemed to magically sprout from the other end. We got talking to Carol a bit afterwards - funnily enough she'd spent some time in Zimbabwe in the eighties, working with the Campfire project in Binga, and she'd loved it there. Anyway, she's got a great operation in Vientiane, in this beautiful old house, and also in Cambodia; definitely worth a visit if you're close by.

After a quick sundowner, we decided to splash out on dinner, and we went to the Cote d'Azur, just down from our restaurant. A superb Chateaubriand and bottle of good Bordeaux set us back about twenty quid, which was the most expensive meal of our trip by a long way, and we rolled back up to bed ... three months without red meat and red wine makes you realise how rich it all is ... and I definately had some wierd dreams that night!