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Located some 25km from downtown Vientiane on the Mekong River, Xiang Khouan or the " Buddha Park " (daily 8am-6pm; 1000K), is surely Laos's quirkiest attraction. This collection of massive ferro-concrete sculptures, which lie dotted around a wide riverside meadow, was created under the direction of Luang Phu Boonlua Surirat, a self-styled holy man who claimed to have been the disciple of a cave-dwelling Hindu hermit in Vietnam. Upon returning to Laos, Boonlua began the sculpture garden in the late 1950s as a means of spreading his philosophy of life and his ideas about the cosmos. Besides the brontosaurian reclining Buddha that dominates the park, there are concrete statues of every conceivable deity in the Hindu-Buddhist pantheon. After the revolution, Boonlua was forced to flee across the Mekong to Nong Khai, Thailand, where he established an even more elaborate version of his philosophy in concrete at Sala Kaeo Kou, also known as Wat Khaek . To get to the park , either take bus #14 from Vientiane's main bus station (every 40min), or get a shared tuk-tuk from near the Morning Market to Thadua, from where it's a three-kilometre walk or a short hop by tuk-tuk.
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