Thunder and Lightning

When we departed the internet yesterday, the clouds looked ominous, dark and foreboding in the mountains. And we could see lightning and hear thunder. Cool, our first thuderstorm!!!! We both love them, so we headed down to the river and wathced the storm approach. You could see the mountains dissappear in the rain, it was quite cool. Of course, we didn't have any cameras with us. We ate supper at a riverfront restaurant, as the storm passed us by.

But, alas, the heart of the storm passed north of Vang Vieng. We did get a lot of rain, but the thunder and lightning was a fair distance away. And the rain came down in buckets for a while.

While it was raining, we went to another restaurant and watched "I Spy". Very funny movie. They were advertising it is brand new, so the restaurant was quite busy. Then we went home and to bed.

I slept crappy last night, Courtney too.

We had breakfast about 8:30 or 9:00, then checked the weather forecast on the internet. It's not supposed to get nice until Sunday, so instead of hanging around Vang Vieng and doing the kayaking trip tomorrow, we decided to head to Vientiane today.

So, we went to the bus station to check the schedule, and the next bus to Vientiane leaves at 12:30, so we went and packed and checked out, and walked to the bus station about 11:30. The bus was already there, so I had to actually climb onto the top of the bus with my backpack and deposit it up there, then come back down, put Courtney's backpack on and do it all again. We then grabbed a seat on the bus, put our bags down, and browsed the little market around the station. We got a few snacks for the trip, and I noticed a lot of locals and more and more falang getting on the bus, I got concerned for our seats, and sat down with our stuff. (The space bar doesn't work good on this computer, so don't complain about my sentences...)

The bus was packed by the time we were ready to leave. They had all kinds of plastic chairs down the aisle of the bus, and a few people had to actually stand. Good thing we came down here early and got a seat.

Courtney had the aisle seat, and an old, great-grandmap was sitting beside Courtney, and she spit red stuff out of her mouth onto the floor, and part of it got on Courtney. She wasn't impressed. A while later, everyone in thh aisle shifted around, and the old, great-grandma got moved away, to be replaced by a "not-as-old-but-still-old-grandma", and she sat beside Courtney and kept bringing up huge gobs of mucus and spit from her throat and spitting it into a plastic bag. Courtney turned to me and said, "Ok, I'm getting thoroughly disgusted." Later on, some other woman behind Courtney started vomitting into a bag, Court thought she was going to hurl too, listening to it. Oh well, what can you expect for an 80 cent public bus in Laos.

We got to Vientiane about 4:00. A few falang climbed to the to top of the bus to get their bags, then climbed right back down, so I climbed up there, and helped the bus driver unload all the bags. As we were unloading he asked me my name, and where I was from, and he was very grateful for my help unloading the packs.

While I was unloading the packs, a tuk-tuk driver hit up Courtney, so when I got down, he asked me where we wanted to go, I told him the one I had picked out of Rough Guide, he said he knew that one, so off we went. The Rough Guide indicated that this one was relatively cheap, and had satellite TV in the rooms, hot showers in the rooms. When we got there, they only had $10 rooms available, with A/C in them. We took it, and will try to move to a $6 or $7 room tomorrow ($6 has fan and outside bathrooms, $7 rooms has fan and en-suite bathrooms). According to the Rough Guide, it's hard to get a good room for $10 in Vientiane, anything under the $10 price range is a dump, so I think we got a pretty good place. It's not in downtown Vientiane, but just on the outskirts of central Vientiane (within easy walking distance).

Cloudy today. Court has a cold. She stuffs a pointy piece of toilet paper up her nose to make herself sneeze.

Our satellite TV isn't...we only get 2 channels...our TV isn't programmed correctly, I tried to have it scan for channels, but didn't come up with anything more. Oh well, this is Laos. But, our hot water heater works superbly!!! WOW!! It's like I'm at home having a hot shower!

We went for supper at a food night market, then back to the guest house and watched some Vietnamese TV, Courtney dosed off, and I started reading "The Damage Done". It's a book someone recommended to us (and Courtney bought in Chaing Khong), and it's about an Australian that spent 12 years in a Bangkok prison for drug trafficking. Courtney was addicted to it, she couldn't put it down when she was reading it.

I finally went to sleep about 10:00.

Everything in Vientiane is very expensive. Expect to pay 2-4 times the price for food and accomodations compared to other places, especially food (except internet, which is dirt cheap here!)