"Really hard to get"

The bus ride from Hanoi to Vientiane was longish, the Vietnamese border police were kind of funny in their seriousness about extorting 10,000 dong from everyone 'for the stamp'. Ha. If I ever start bribing people it is going to be for more than 67 cents! Lao mountains are beautiful; the villages looked like northern Thailand. Vientiane was full of temples. Big temples. I went to see a bunch of them, along with a great big golden stupa shaped like a lotus bloom that is the symbol of Laos in general. At one temple, I met a monk who spoke English and talked with him for awhile. I thought I had a quote of the day, then he gave me another one.

#1 – “Enlightenment is really hard to get“

#2 – Regarding a DVD of American pro wrestling, “Now you must answer me completely honestly, is this real?”

Buddha Park is a kind of mixture between an amusement park and a temple. Just a big yard full of big and little concrete Buddhas in various poses, as well as a few elephants and crocodiles, and a three storey pumpkin with heaven, earth and hell inside it (and a lot of cobwebs - in all three, I guess spiders are mortal too).

I rode bike outside of town to where the road went off the bank above the Mekong (that wasn't supposed to happen, I tend to get lost a lot - why do you think I'm in Laos) so I stopped and watched the Mekong, and some tiny fishermen on the other bank for awhile, and some kind person just randomly came up out of nowhere and gave me a big glass of cold water (hopefully it was not Mekong Water because I did drink it). After turning around and trying how many times to ask directions to where I wanted to go (why is it that after a whole year of studying two sort of difficult languages, I still go somewhere where I can't even remember how to say Thank You to people?) I end up sitting in a little restaurant across from yet another huge temple with Buddha the size of the house I visited sitting on the roof, and trying to convince a friend there that I really didn't want to drink many glasses of Bia Lao before pedaling back to town in the heat.

Last night took a 9 hr bus ride. This was a full sized bus barreling through the countryside of Lao to transport, count ‘em up, TWO tourists, and three guys to drive and push buffalos out of the way, from Vientiane to Pakse. Well, at least I had room to sleep, even though I still didn't get much.

I should go back there someday, my friend whose house I visited told me of so many other places to go and see... Anyway, now I am on my way to Cambodia, Pakxe is like the last bit of town (and it is only a bit of town) before the border, which I will cross as soon as I get my passport back with my Vietnamese re-entry visa.