I thought 'Voilà' (here it is!) was a fitting headline being that Vientiane is Asia's smallest capital city with a mix of French colonial architecture from it's history and a splattering of Buddhist buildings throughout make this a little gem that has to be seen.
On arrival in to the domestic terminal it was like arriving in to someone's front room. A tiny room with a conveyer belt in the middle and not enough room for a plane full of people! Seeing as this was the capital, I thought Luang Prabang airport was bigger and more modern! I think they must have been in the middle of constructing a new terminal.
As I was only in Vientiane for one full day, I enquired at the hotel and managed to get a good deal for a private cab to take us around the city for 3 hours for $25, so not too shabby! I'd looked online before arriving and wanted to go and see Buddha Park which is a large park on the outskirts of the city and has more than 200 buddhist related statues dotted around, some quite quirky. It sits alongside the Mekong river which flows throughout Vientiane and all the way from where I was in Luang Prabang in the north. As Vientiane sits right on the Thai border, it's weird to think one side of the river is Laos, the other is Thailand! It was cool to wander around here and particular one of the statues which you can climb up and have a large view of the park. It's hard to describe but it's basically a large circular sculpture which you enter through a statues mouth and there are Buddha statues inside and a series of very narrow and steep staircases up each level until you crawl (literally!) out of the top! Pretty cool.
After Buddha park, I had a tour of the city and the main sites with the taxi driver dropping me off at each while he waited. The main ones are below in the pics - That Luang was the first and is a large gold stupa and temple complex in the centre of Vientiane that represents the Buddhist religion and the Lao sovereignty. When the sun is shining, it's pretty bright reflecting off this building. We stopped at the presidential palace too and a couple of other temples that all look different. One of the highlights is Patuxai, also known as Victory Gate, which is a monument in the city centre that was built as a symbol to the people who had fought for independence from France. It has similarities to that of the Arc di Triomphe in Paris. There is a long road leading up to the monument which also reminds me of the Champs Elysses too.
Vientiane is a small city that's easy to get around, pretty in parts with lots of interesting architecture. About 2 days would be enough to do everything and I didn't leave feeling like I missed anything as such. It was more of a quick stopover for my adventure to start in Hanoi, Vietnam, a short 50 minute flight away.
