TravellingStrom

Mayan Prophecy Countdown

Sunday 9th December

Although I have had much experience at lazing around, after a while, in a town as crappy as this, and by that I mean a capital city, I can still get itchy feet. It is interesting trying to find new places to eat or drink, and having a scooter means I am mobile, sort of 🙂 Anyway, I have been doing some research on line and found there are two more Geocaches in town here, so I decided to go find them.

The first one was not that far away, it was at a place called Patuxay Park. It is a war memorial, called by many names, but Patuxai is the name of the cache, you can read the description here

It is a Laos styled Arc de Triumphe monument, and looks pretty cool, it is not until you get inside it though that you find to get to the top, to find the cache, you have to go past many many levels of tempting tourist tat 🙂

The views from up on top were real cool, the big white building is the prime ministers office complex, a very clean and tidy one as well 🙂

The actual cache was not here though, I had to go higher, after looking around I found another set of steps to get me up there and then it was a pretty easy find 🙂

On the way down I was quite happy to see amongst all the tat, some stickers, so I grabbed a couple for the bike as I went past. There are a lot of photographers here selling their services and it is real strange to see scanner/printers strapped to a scooter, but I guess it makes sense getting the product right away 🙂

So, that was a success and it was still only early 🙂 Now, the next cache was a bit different, it had been disabled just recently because it had been muggled by some local kids 😦 But, a cacher placed a small cache, near the site just to give the rest of us something to log, so that was all good. The original cache is called Laos – Germany 50 Years of Diplomatic Relations It was placed near a wall, but the last cacher who had been through and found it asked local kids to help, what a plonker, to make matters worse he placed some items in there called trackables, and of course the local kids nicked off with it 😦 Trackables are items that have an individual serial or tracking number and can move from cache to cache to follow a theme, like being near water, or it may want to get home, after being dropped off as far away as possible. A shame some of those will never be found or complete their goal now 😦 Anyway, thanks to old matey, there was something to find and it was quite easy as well, so another success, even if it is not official.

Lunchtime I went back to the Khonkao, but I have to say I was not impressed by the meal I chose today. It was called Gold Bags and was supposed to have mince in it, but it was pretty lacking in the meat department, although it was tasty enough, it was not a filling meal!! I won’t choose that one again!

I did some more lazing in the afternoon, checking out the net and sorting out photos. Because I am using both my normal camera and my iPhone I have two sets of photos to compile each day. It is hard because for some reason the iPhone dates on each file do not match when they were taken, it seems to have a different time zone, even though the settings are correct. So, for example, a photo I took on the 9th, might show up as having been taken on the 10th, very frustrating and is part of the reason the blog is not up to date, apathy as well 🙂 During the day I was contacted by a Vstrom couple who were interested in meeting up, so we arranged to meet at the Spirit Bar for sundowners and so we did 🙂 This is Luigi and Sue, they are cruising SEA until next Feb.

We had a couple here then went up to the Khongkao for some dinner, which was fine but we did not stay long as they had a hoedown going which was extremely loud, and we wanted to chat, which was impossible, so we headed back to the Spirit House for a couple more 🙂

They mentioned they were going to get their Thai visas in the morning, which reminded me that I also needed to do something about this. My Laos one was about to run out, on the 12th and the bike well, it was overdue 😦 I decided I would apply for a double entry Thai one, and also while here I would grab the Cambodian one as well, even though they are available at the border. To do all that though, I would have to go back to the bike rental lady and get my passport back(it gets left on deposit while you have the bike). I would also need to go to the bike shop and get my bike paperwork and other docs ready for this.

After a good chat and a few beers we called it a night, the embassy was open at 08.30, so I would have to zip around before that and get some stuff sorted. We arranged to meet up for lunch at a pizza place 🙂

Cheers from Vientiane
TravellingStrom