After a much shorter and more punctual bus ride than the one from Luang Prabang we arrive in Vientiane, the capital of Laos.  As capital cities go it is very small, only 250,000 people, and there do not appear to be any buildings over about 5 stories here, so the city is quite spread out.  The Mekong river runs along one side of the city, and forms the border between Thailand and Laos.

We spend a few hours walking the city and go by the presidential palace, and down along the Mekong where they have built a long wall to protect the city from flooding, and a park in behind the wall.  There is a large statue in the park that has a few tourists around it, but we do not find out until later that it is of King Anouvong, the last king of Vientiane – clearly this has not made our history books back home yet.

Extending up from the presidential palace is a long boulevard that ends at one of the fairly small number of tourist attractions here in Vietiane – their own version of the Arc de Triomphe.  Known as Patuxai or the Victory Arch, it was built to commemorate those that fought to get independence from France – just a little irony there!

There is a big gold colored Chedi here as well that is featured on the flag of Laos, and a couple of other locations that are considered tourist highlights, but after the arch we are not overly impressed and just decide to walk back to our hotel and start looking for dinner.

None of this is news to us as many other people we talked to had mentioned that Vientiane was nothing worth stopping for, and we would certainly concur that for us it is nothing more than a waypoint on a trip either to or from much more interesting destinations farther north.

That pretty much ends the trip for us, tomorrow we will make our way back to Bangkok and then the next day begins the long flight back to Seattle……