I have moved north since my last entry and I'm still loving Laos!
I have now joined the majority of SEAsia backpackers and bought myself a Beer Lao T shirt, which is rather fetching, and I managed to bargain the woman down from approximately 1 pound to approximately 80p so I felt very proud of myself.
From trekking in Savvankhet I got another long bus ride north to Vientiane. I decided to be a cheapskate and took the local bus, which was a wise choice because they filled the aisle with sacks of rice, which meant I had a nice pillow to rest my weary head. The downside was that I arrived in Vientiane at 4:30 am. Still, I'd learnt my lesson after walking round Ha Noi for hours in the early morning and I sat in the bus station half asleep until about 7:30 am when I judged that everything would be opening.
I had already heard that accomadation in Vietiane was a) expensive and b) hard to find so I accepted a matress on the floor for 2.50 a night (rip off!), lay down for a half hour nap, woke up about 5 hours later and belatedly set about exploring the quietest and most relaxed capital city in SE Asia.
There's not actually a whole heap to see in Vientiane, but it does have the nicest places to eat. I fell in love with JoMa bakery which actually has Early Grey tea and Granary toast. I honestly nearly wept for joy. Aside from that there were a few historical sights I got to...
The Patuxai is a sort of French-inspired 'Arc de Triomphe' the Laos governemnt built with concrete that the Americans donated in order to built an international airport. Confused? welcome to Laos politics.
I also went to the Buddha Park, which is a very strange place filled with amateur statues of Buddhist and Hindu deities and to one of the oldest temples in Laos, which was beautiful. I haven't quite hit temple overload yet, but I can see it coming. Other than that Vientiane is really a blur of pleasant meals and stocking up on useful things like memory sticks, torches and pig-shaped pillows which you can't get elsewhere in Laos (I was devestated when my pig pillow got lost somwhere on the Vietnamese/Cambodian Border. Still, I will try and love the new one just as much)
After that I hopped on a bus to Vang Vieng. Vang Vieng has a reputation for being a god-foresaken place that has sold its soul to backpackers looking to get drunk and high and watch reruns of Friends until their ears bleed, but actually I found it much nicer than I was expecting.
Yes there is a street full of TV bars, most of them playing Friends on a loop, and yes it's kind of wierd, but I loved lying down and watching TV over a pizza after another long bus ride north. Also they all shut at 10:30 and once you step away from the river the town is very Laos, relaxed and beautiful and full of people getting on with their lives.
The other thing that Vang Vieng is famous for is 'tubing' where you sit in the inner tube of a tyre and float down the Mekong. You go over rapids and stop at riverside bars for Beer Laos and rope swings into the river.
I was expecting something heart stopping from the rapids, also I was expecting the swings to be bits of rope knotted to trees a la Schmaltzy American movies. How wrong I was on both counts.
The 'rapids' were really just the odd rock: in fact a couple of times I had to swim to get my tube moving. The rope swings on the other hand were 10m or more out of the water, towering bamboo platforms with zip wires off them.
I won't say I was the first one up there (cause I wasn't) but I was the first girl, and I did it totally sober and I got some disbelieving gasps form the other girls, mostly because the first zipwire was possibly the scariest. It had a nice spring on the line so that when you hit it, you were flung off the handle and backflipped into the river. I managed to land shoulder first (quite an achievement I thought) and managed to totally wrench my shoulder in the process (easy to do when you have an existing problem with your shoulder, a more sensible person would have let go before they hit the spring)
All of which set me up quite nicely for the second swinging wire (which was also the highest and therefore the second most scary) where I discovered I was unable to hold my own body weight with my injured arm and I fell off about 2 seconds into my first swing, fortunately I had swung down to be quite near the water line. I had my eyes shut so I'm not quite sure.
I really enjoyed the zipwires (honestly! I'm not being sacracastic) but I felt it quite a lot the next day...
In between the wires and the beer laos there was floating along in a tube, which was very cold but an excellent way to see stunning scenery. The mountains tower over the Mekong on both sides and as we were doing it on an overcast day we saw the clouds rolling down towards us on the river. Definitely recommended.
The next day was even more wet and cold, proving that I had made the right choice in tubing in the slightly less wet, cold weather of the day before. I trundled up a hill (and when I say a hill I mean a very rocky and difficult to climb hill, with sections where my little legs could hardly reach and others which were only reachabel by climbing up ladders made by the locals hammering stiucks together, so be impressed by my intrepidness!) also I went climbing around in a cave, with the result that the next day my thighs ached, even as my arms recovered.
That was it for Vang Vieng and I have now reached Luang Prabang. It's a lovely city, although very touristy (also with good food but I am tightening my belt money-wise and pretty much living off La Vache qui rit Baguettes) Yesterday I went to a waterfall with the group I met tubing (where I fell off a rope swing and managed to get rope burns all down my inner thighs. It's been a difficult week all round really!) Still, we had fun trekking up by the waterfall and watching the bears and a beautiful tiger at the rescue centre at the bottom. We also had a night of drinking games which, unsurprisingly, I lost terribly, but didn't have even a tiny bit of a hangover, so I guess you could say really I won.
Today I have been pottering round the town, having a look at temples and museums. I had a nice chat with a young Buddhist novice this monring who showed me to the temple I was after, and I am trying to sort out my money as I am at the last ATM until Thailand. Tomorrow I am off to mysterious Plain of Jars....
I still have another couple of weeks in Laos so I will have to find some more things to fill it, I am here until the Gibbon Experience starts on 17th February.
Until then I expect I shall find something nice and quiet to do while my body recovers from all the swinging and climbing.
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