Vientiane
Despite Vientiane, the capital of Laos, not having many sights or activities of particular interest to us, we needed to stay a few nights to arrange our visas for Thailand. Strangely, at a land border they will only issue a two week visa; however, arrival via air permits a 4 week visa. Why? No idea! Just seems so silly and also forces many backpackers to trek across to Myanmar to extend their visas. We really did not want to do a 'visa run' halfway through our trip, especially whilst either Matthew or Jonny were going to be with us. Instead we got some new passport photos, some Thai Baht and headed off to the Thai consulate first thing in the morning. The visa application was fairly painless, although the queuing system was rather chaotic as expected. The new visas would hopefully be ready for collection the next afternoon. Easy! Thailand will be our 15th country on this trip and the first time we have been required to visit a consulate or embassy, so not bad really!
Once our visa applications were lodged we spent the afternoon catching up on our blog and watching the Spanish Grand Prix. Fantastic to see Williams at the front again! It's turning out to be an exciting season and we are continuing to watch every race :-). Later, we met up with Mel and Kirk, friends we had made whilst in Sihanoukville, Cambodia. We joined their tour group for some authentic Lao food away from the main tourist traps and us ladies treated ourselves to a well-deserved bottle of wine.
On our final day we hired a scooter so we could collect our visas and see some of the sights Vientianne has too offer. Collecting the visas was no trouble at all but finding the consulate proved to be very tricky; never trust the maps in a Lonely Planet. Luckily Mark is a genius when it comes to finding your way. His internal GPS kicked in and suddenly we were outside the consulate which was nowhere near where the Lonely Planet map said it would be. We took in a few temples (filled with numerous golden buddhas) but, honestly, they weren't that great so we moved on quickly. The Cope Visitor Centre was highly recommended to us, so we stopped off on our way back. What an excellent organisation. They provide prosthetic legs and arms to victims of UXO explosions. UXOs are explosive weapons that failed to detonate when they were dropped by the Americans during the indochina war and still pose a risk. Many of the victims are children or farmers working in their fields. What is really sad is that the scrap metal in the UXOs has value and people including children go out looking for the bombies to make money. There are around 300 victims per year. Cope centre aids in educating the locals to not interfere with bombs and also pays for prosthetics and rehabilitation of victims who are too poor to afford treatment. We saw a deeply moving film about their work and the photos and thank you letters made me want to cry. If you would like to read more about their work and make a donation online you can visit their website http://www.copelaos.org/.
