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Day 16 - Luang Prabang
Entry 17 of 243 | show all | print this entry |
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We woke up about 8am, and went straight out even though it looked a bit grey and threatened rain...
We grabbed a quick bite for breakfast, and then headed off to the Tourist Office to get a map, and to find out where the Vietnamese Consulate was.
Our next destination will be Hanoi, capital of Vietnam, and we had been told previously that you have to go to the main Vietnamese Embassy in Vientiane (the capital of Laos, a few hundred kms further south) to get the correct visa. Thankfully this proved to be absolute cobblers, so we could save ourselves some money by cutting out the trip to Vientiane and going straight to Hanoi from here.
We filled out the necessary forms, got a bit of travel advice from the nice man in the consulate, paid our US $40 each and agreed to collect our passports complete with shiney new visas tomorrow morning.
That done, we walked back into town to explore a bit more of it.
Luang Prabang is a really beautiful little town. The main part of town is sandwiched between 2 rivers (the Mekong and another which escapes me), and it has a VERY French flavour to it. The Ozzies we met in Luang Namtha on the trek described it as "a cute French town in the middle of the jungle" and as usual they were spot-on.
A massive 85% of land in Laos is "unmanaged vegetation" (i.e. jungle !), so everywhere is so green, and there is so little sign of human life, it's gorgeous. I wonder how long it will stay like this before the tourists pile in and money ruins everything.
Another way to see Luang Prabang is like a younger and prettier Chiang Mai. There are lots of activities to do, and plenty of tour offices tempting you to sign up for boat rides, cave walks, waterfall visits, mountain biking, elephant rides, rafting, etc etc.
Chiang Mai was rather over-touristed (and we're here in the off-season !), whereas Luang Prabang has lots of younger backpackers but few of the older rich tourists that we saw in Thailand. For that reason it also feels a bit cooler, a bit more special.
Katie & I really like it here, people are generally friendly & helpful, even if their English isn't great, you can normally get somewhere with a game of charades !
Laos is great value, the food is tasty, and you can buy "fruit shakes" (smoothies) every 100 metres or so. Anyone that knows me well will remember how much I love fruit juice (the more random the fruit, the better !) so these "shakes" are WONDERFUL for me, I just love 'em ;)
The main stop on our tourist trail today was the temple at the top of the tallest mountain in the town, right in the centre. We were charged 20,000 Kip for the privilege of walking up 300 steps in the now unbroken sunshine, so were both somewhat sweaty when we got to the top !
The view at the very top was AMAZING, as you can see below:
Technically there was a temple/shrine at the top of the hill, but clearly most tourists only really do the climb for the views ! Here's the top of the temple though, looked great in the sunshine...
As you have seen above, the view down the Mekong, over the town and towards the mountain was great. We timed it well because there was a one hour window with the sun, and we got it just right.
It started to cloud up when we came down, and we had an actually very nice sandwich before finding a travel agent and booking our flights to Hanoi.
We're paying $120 each (GBP 60 - there's no POUND symbol on their keyboards !), and fortunately we're flying with Vietnam Airlines rather than with Laos Airlines, who apparently have the worst safety record of any national airline in the world... I like, is nice !
We fly out on Friday, so we'll hire some bikes tomorrow and try and get to the waterfalls, which will no doubt be a crushing disappointment, but you never know...
After booking the flights Katie had a pedicure and I did some internetting, as the day really clouded over and rain threatened. We then went back to our room, and sure enough it then absolutely tipped it down.
When it finished we walked down to the Mekong river, and followed the peninsular around until it turned into the other river, and then walked back into the centre of town, it was a nice walk.
The Mekong side is VERY touristy, and the other side, 10 mins walk in the opposite direction, is extremely untouristy, which is great. It's always good to see how the locals really live.
The sun came out again as we made our way home, passing a few temples like this one:
Just after posting this entry I gave up trying to upload some new photos, and put the memory card back in the camera.
"MEMORY CARD ERROR" screamed the message on the screen.
As you can imagine, my heart sank through the floor. I think we've lost 80% of our photos so far (I did take some on another camera), so I was, and still am, absolutely devastated :(
As the 4MB card is damaged beyond repair (I think it must have a virus from one of the shared PCs, but now the PC won't recognise the card either so I can't perform a virus check on it !), I went to put in the 8MB card we bought at Heathrow before leaving the UK.
To my horror I found that this was not where it should be in my camera bag, so either someone has stolen it (a maid ? someone on the boat ?), or it has fallen out of a very secure internal pocket.
My misery was complete :( :(
The irony is that I very nearly transfered all the images so far onto CD this morning, when the memory card was working fine, but I thought that I'd wait until leaving Luang Prabang, as I don't particularly trust Laos technology... with good reason as it turns out, unfortunately.
I do have small thumbnail photos saved onto a memory key, but they are tiny, but good for loading onto the blog. They won't be able to be blown up to 6x4 when I get home though, so we won't be able to print them out.
So I was in the depths of depression for most of the afternoon & evening, punctuated only by a very nice and relatively very expensive meal at one of the nicest restaurants in town, a French place called L'Elephant.
We had some delicious French food, a REALLY nice bottle of Chilean Cab Sauv, and it did put a smile back on my face at least.
I still went to bed feeling very sad, but at least this happened after 3 weeks, not 3 months. And at least nothing is wrong with the camera, I hope !
We'll just have to buy another memory card in Hong Kong when we get there in a few weeks.
Looks like it will remain risky to load photos from the card onto the virus-prone PCs that we have to use, so I might not be able to load any more photos up for a while.
I'm not sure what to do because the photos really help make the blogs more interesting, I'm sure a lot of people probably just scan the text but look at the photos ? Oh well, chin up Fey san...
lots of love,
Al & Katie xx
Latest Comments (1)
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Memory card (reply)
Sep 19, 2007 13:26 EST by floweh
l, dont ditch the card, you can still get the photos recovered. Be careful though you may have stuck the virus on you camera so if you use a new card in the camera , that may get screwed too.
Well done on losing yet another bit of expensive equipment though. Oh and FANTASTIC performance by your lot last night, scraping a 1-1 draw, the stats said it all, Porto had 10 shots on targ... show all
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