The Pleasants Family discover the Laos Sex Trade

You may recall that at the start of our trip we found ourselves having dinner in a brothel in Bangkok. Well we topped that over the last few days.....
Leaving Vientiane, the road was long, straight and dusty. One stretch ran for 30km without a kink in the tarmac and the view was boring, boring, boring and it was HOT. It was not our favourite cycling day. After 60km or so, we started to look for a place for lunch. Mike pulled up at a roadside place with table cloths (he is a sucker for a nice touch) and the welcome was warm, so we settled in for lunch. The family running the place were very friendly and Sam took a particular shine to one of the girls, aged about 17 or so. She was wearing a fairly transparent top with a fancy bra poking out the top. Another girl had heavy eye make up and a relatively provocative top. We began to wonder......Any lingering doubts were swept away when an older guy rocked up and started drinking beer with one of them.....I went to the loo and noticed a couple of private bedrooms on the way. So, lunch in a brothel.

After an (admittedly very delicious) lunch, we went on our way, looking for a hotel. Eventually we saw a sign, 200m down a dirt track, and off we went. It was quite pleasant. We only began to wonder an hour or two later when a van rolled up with an older guy and a younger girl. They disappeared into a room and left an hour or two later. So, overnight in a brothel.

That evening we went out for dinner. First stop a brothel, second stop a brothel, third stop a brothel, finally found a restaurant that wasn't a brothel. After dinner I returned to the hotel with the kids and Mike went to a shop across the road from our hotel to get a beer. An hour or so later I could hear a girl screaming with laughter. He's a funny guy, but not that funny......clearly something was up. Mike came back shortly later, looking a bit alarmed. Turns out that the two girls in the shop were chatting to him (they didn't speak English, he doesn't speak Laos, but clearly they managed). The conversation took a turn for the worse when they showed him a poster of some Laos women (very innocuous picture from the national airline, but with three or four attractive women on it) and asked him which one he liked best. One of them then surreptitiously showed him a picture on her phone of two girls kissing, then showed him another picture of a naked girl and gave him the eye. He scarpered.

Mike likes to think that they may have just been 'excitable young girls' but I suspect not. So, a drink in a brothel too.

The following day we left and things returned to normal. I suspect it was just a 5km stretch of road that has somehow got renowned for prostitution and we stumbled unsuspectingly upon it.