From Don Det we regretfully took the boat/mini-bus transfer to the lovely southern town of Pakse. Fellow travelers report that outside of Pakse are some lovely waterfalls and Khmer ruins, but with an overnight bus to catch that night, we decided to spend our afternoon there in a different way.
Ben, a great lover of massages, had convinced me, the cheapskate, that we were due a little luxury, and we were directed up the street to this hotel,
where we were told we could grab a shower and a massage. It looked wayyy too fancy to me... I figured that they'd take one look (and smell!) at us with our ratty t-shirts and shoo us right out the door. That and I imagined that any spa services that this place was offering would be just a tad outside our budget. How wrong I was. For $5 a pop we each had an almost warm shower (we'd been almost two weeks with the cold showers in this stretch) and a fabulous Lao massage. We'd both gotten stuffy noses while staying in the green paradise of Don Det, so the menthol rub-down that came with the massage not only left us tingly, but cleared our noses right out as well.
After street-sandwiches and a beer with some fellow travelers from the islands, we boarded our overnight bus for the capital. These sleeper buses were totally different than the ones we became so familiar with in Vietnam -- on each side of the bus were bunks of almost-full length "double" beds. It was a very cozy night's sleep for Ben and me, though perhaps might have been less so if either of us had been stuck spooning a stranger.
We arrived in Vientiane at 6am, and lucked out in that our shared jumbo tuk-tuk from the bus station ended up driving us all over town dropping other people off, allowing us to see lots of beautiful wats in the morning light. After finding a hotel, we set out to look for a cobbler to repair Ben's sandals (success!), and to find the Arc de Triomphe look-alike in the center of the city.
We had been promised ugly by travelers moving the otherway down through Laos, and the sign on it's wall seems to support that view... 
That afternoon heavy rains moved in, and so we ate, napped, emailed, and took it easy in a city that it is easy to relax in. While everyone had told us there wasn't much to do in this tiny capital city, it was wonderfully laid back and if we'd had more time, we would have loved to stay another day or two soaking up the great French food and architecture and the slow pace.
Ben, a great lover of massages, had convinced me, the cheapskate, that we were due a little luxury, and we were directed up the street to this hotel,
where we were told we could grab a shower and a massage. It looked wayyy too fancy to me... I figured that they'd take one look (and smell!) at us with our ratty t-shirts and shoo us right out the door. That and I imagined that any spa services that this place was offering would be just a tad outside our budget. How wrong I was. For $5 a pop we each had an almost warm shower (we'd been almost two weeks with the cold showers in this stretch) and a fabulous Lao massage. We'd both gotten stuffy noses while staying in the green paradise of Don Det, so the menthol rub-down that came with the massage not only left us tingly, but cleared our noses right out as well.After street-sandwiches and a beer with some fellow travelers from the islands, we boarded our overnight bus for the capital. These sleeper buses were totally different than the ones we became so familiar with in Vietnam -- on each side of the bus were bunks of almost-full length "double" beds. It was a very cozy night's sleep for Ben and me, though perhaps might have been less so if either of us had been stuck spooning a stranger.
We arrived in Vientiane at 6am, and lucked out in that our shared jumbo tuk-tuk from the bus station ended up driving us all over town dropping other people off, allowing us to see lots of beautiful wats in the morning light. After finding a hotel, we set out to look for a cobbler to repair Ben's sandals (success!), and to find the Arc de Triomphe look-alike in the center of the city.
We had been promised ugly by travelers moving the otherway down through Laos, and the sign on it's wall seems to support that view... That afternoon heavy rains moved in, and so we ate, napped, emailed, and took it easy in a city that it is easy to relax in. While everyone had told us there wasn't much to do in this tiny capital city, it was wonderfully laid back and if we'd had more time, we would have loved to stay another day or two soaking up the great French food and architecture and the slow pace.
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