We met for breakfast after which we packed our things, left it in our respective guesthouses and hired a tuk-tuk to take us to Buddha Park followed by the Stuppa That Lang and the local “Arch of Triumph” – Anousavaly or Patouxay.

Buddha Park (Wat Xieng Khuan) is a weird place where the founder attempted to blend Buddhism and Hinduism religions, tradition and legends. The place was created in 1954, which one would guess based on the material used to build the pumpkin building and create all the sculptures there - it is all made of concrete. It seems that it was not only the European communist countries who seems to had been fascinated by this material at around that time… :-)

So in Buddha Park you will find a sizable 4 storey structure in the shape of pumpkin which contains many small to medium size concrete sculptures, most of them very obscure.  After the pumpkin structure you will find a huge statue of reclining Buddha and dozens of other statues of medium to very large sizes that combine characters from the two religions. There is a three-headed elephant, Kylie standing on a man she just killed, a huge monster like man carrying a (by the looks) Hindu woman (he probably also has a name but I’m not really an expert on these religions) and lots of others. I liked it as it is certainly and interesting (and quite different) place to see and the rest of the guys seemed to have really loved it.

The Stuppa is an interesting structure, however, if it weren’t entirely gold it would have little other interesting points to boast. Fortunately the sun started to shine and there is also couple of wats around which made this visit a very nice photographic affair. At the end I personally liked this place more than the Buddha Park.

The Arch of Triumph has been built by the French and decorations have been left unfinished when they left. The arch is very similar to the one in Paris, but this one is ornamented in Lao style (that is at parts where they managed to do it… ;-) ). 

It was much later in the afternoon when we returned from our excursion and the guys weren’t sure if there was going to be a later bus to Vang Vieng which we wanted to reach today. The last one was leaving in half an hour so they quickly grabbed their packs and left. We agreed to meet there in Vang Vieng in a restaurant mentioned by Lonely Planet.

I reached Vang Vieng in the dark already. As I was trying to find the restaurant (most locals were saying that it didn’t exist in Vang Vieng) I visited a few guesthouses and negotiated prices. At the end I haven’t stayed there as it was quite far from the main tourist street where I managed to find the guys at the end, but I found one guesthouse that I have to mention. This guesthouse was discounted for me to three dollars but looked like 5 star hotel. I couldn’t believe my eyes when they showed me the room. Huge room, antique furniture, great bathroom and bed and water, tea and coffee for free. All that for USD3!

It took me another hour to close in on the restaurant and when I seemed to be really close Stefan knocks on my shoulder. They were in different restaurant that was only across the street from the place where I was asking for new directions again. Great, we managed to meet up again!

Only across the street from their 3 dollar guesthouse I was offered a nice one for 3 bucks as well and subsequently bargained it down to only 2 dollars for the night if I gave the young landlady a ride on my motorbike, which wasn’t too hard to accept… ;-)

We moved to another very cozy restaurant where you sit/lie on soft mats and pillows and I had my dinner. It was there I noticed that the Czechs were playing with the Dutch tonight at 1:45AM. I could not miss a Czech performance on Euro 2004 of course! I first joined Stefan to watch Germans to play against Latvia and then, after tired Stefan was long gone I continued watching the other game. They usually loose when I’m watching, like the game with England that I watched with Gareth in Melaka, Malaysia, where they lost after 20 games in a row where they were unbeaten. This match started similarly – after a two great chances we had in the first couple of minutes the Dutch got onto our half for the first time and we were loosing 0-1. Fortunately the Czechs won at the end after first loosing loosing 0-2 in the first 20 minutes. I was happy and I was happy that I stayed watching.