SEA Trip Day 14 – Mangosteens and Hairy Lychee
After all the noise and clutter of Phnom Penh, Vientiane was quite lovely. It’s got the vibe of the suburbs in a city setting, and everyone here is really nice. Also, something that we were very happy about was the organizated traffic in the roads. No crazy drivers, and popo at major intersections to enforce laws.
We started our day off with the morning market at Thalat Sao. It’s actually a mall, but the surrounding areas extend into stalls selling food and goods. The most immediate difference that we noticed in this market was the number of shops selling cloth. I guess this was a pretty good reflection on the textile industry in Northern Laos. It was pretty funny seeing the areas of electronics as well, where fridges and washing machines were cluttered in little stalls. We stopped at a little coffee shop in the mall building, where Amy had coffee while I had ice cream. I noticed that the little boy sitting at the next table also ordered coconut ice cream, and I mentally gave him a high five for making great choices.
After a lovely morning, we strolled through the city towards lunch at Makphet. Vientiane is filled with temples, and we passed by quite a few of them in the 20 minutes or so we were on the road. Theyre all small temples compared to what we had seen in Cambodia, but they were still pretty interesting to stop by and look around. Some are just temples while others are clusters of buildings within gated walls. Many of them had the 7 headed snake along its gates or stairs. We finally reached the restaurant, after too many times saying no to tuk tuk drivers and waving on the honking ones.
Makphet is an interesting restaurant. It’s really good food, and tries to put a “modern” twist on traditional dishes, but it is also run with the intention of working with local kids to train them with professional skills. The prices are more expensive than street food (though still cheaper than American food) but its worth it (especially since the food was delicious) to support a good cause. The restaurant has a small area dedicated as a shop for crafts and goods that the kids’ parents have made. They’re cute little goodies, and there’s a noticeable amount of up cycling (yay, stamp of approval) that occurs in making these products.
Tip – if you’re craving international food, the few blocks around where Makphet is located holds many restaurants. There’s a pretty decent French restaurant nearby. The international food in Vientiane (aka, not local Lao food) is actually supposed to be quite good, maybe due to the location and amount of influence from bordering and not so bordering countries. You can see a good amount of French influence here, in the forms of architecture, Canadian banks, and French schools sprinkled around the city.
Once our stomachs were full, we decided to take a little adventure out into the middle of nowhere. We took a tuk-tuk out to Huong Huey market (lots of dried fish and clams here), and strolled down the road for awhile. We came upon the Huong Huey vocational training center for women, which was an area supporting women who wanted to weave as a job. There’s a lot of emphasis around here on keeping traditional weaving alive. We took a tour around the dyeing area as well as the weaving room (these chickadees have so much patience), then peaced out. It’s pretty impressive, how much detail is put into the patterns, and how long pieces take to make (some up to one months worthy of work), but it really is quite beautiful.
Our adventure bore nothing else in terms of interesting places to drop by. In fact, we probably were in the middle of nowhere considering we had to walk for 15 minutes before we found a tuk tuk to take us back. We returned to the hostel for some pool, chilling, and researching, then headed to the Mekong River for some night market fun.
There’s a nice little path along the river, which we followed while enjoying the lovely sunset. You could definitely tell it was still not truly the wet season (despite the sprinkles in previous countries) because the river was quite low. You could hop walk down the stairs from the path to the river and hop along little islands.
There were a lot of bikes going up and down the path, and a large group of people doing aerobics in a platforms area next to the river. It seemed to be a free public thing because you saw families and friends of all ages, exercising together.
At the entrance of the night market are carts full of food, grilled skewers of meat, pancakes (traveler’s staple), bubble tea, and fruit. Amy got super excited about the mangosteens, and since I had never had one, and we had a 10 hour bus ride the next day, it was the perfect excuse to get some healthy snacks to minch on. The lady with the cart of fruit then also sold us some furry lychee things after letting us try them (Clara says they’re called rambutans). They’re drier than lychees and not as sweet, but its nice because they’re easier to peel and eat without making a mess. I was super excited about fruit, so we bought a good bunch of them and continued on our way.
The night market is pretty decent here, and though we didn’t really pick anything up, it was fun seeing the new set of items (everything in Thailand looks the same, and everything in Cambodia looks the same, so a new country was a nice change of pace). The fruit shakes were a little sketch looking, but we had some ice cream, cracked some mangosteens, and had a decent stroll before heading back.
The hostel was thumping that night, and Beerlao was actually nicer than college beer, which was a wonderful change from Angkor beer. We went to sleep happy, and unfortunately there was a bit of a disturbance when one of the guys in our room tried to bring in a girl (and was kicked out by management), but other than that we knocked out pretty quickly.