I'm a traveller get me out of here!
Trip Start
Jan 23, 2006
1
16
57
Trip End
Ongoing
Louang Phrabang, Lao Peoples Dem Rep
Wednesday, March 1, 2006
We arrived in Louang Phrabang at about 3pm and decided to walk into the town centre. After about an hour we were approached by a man with pictures of a guesthouse, he quickly lowered his asking price from 5 to 4 dollars a night so we thought we would take a look. After another long walk we arrived at this mans guesthouse, which seemed pleasant enough but about 5km out of town... we were missing our bikes already! We paid up front for 4 nights, our room had a private bathroom, a fan and air-con so we were more than happy at paying 20 dollars for it. However later that night there was a knock at the door, one of the staff was to give us the disappointing news that if we wanted to use the air-con we would have to double the price of the room..
I hate spiders!
. we turned it off!Our change of plan meant that we would now travel further north to China instead of heading back into Northern Thailand. For this we needed to arrange our visa. We used one of the local agencies and begrudgingly handed over our passports and 90 dollars for the privilege. We were told to return the following Wednesday at 19:30 to pick them up.
What, no forms, no signatures, apparently not! We were not too sure that these visas were going to do the job! So the following Wednesday we went back to the agency and waited for our pick-up. The doors were shut, nobody was home. We began to get worried. After waiting around for about 25 minutes a man approached us "passports? 10 minutes that way". Huh? So we walked in the direction that he had pointed and found that the Viva Agency we had used had a Viva 2 Agency just down the road, panic over, just hope that these visas will work at the Chinese border!
There are two things to do in Louang Phrabang, and the locals have learnt the English for these off the top of their heads. Everywhere you walk you will be approached by the greeting of "caves" or "waterfall"
It's a Monks Life!
. The waterfall is excellent but the caves were a bit disappointing..especially after a 4 hour round journey on a slow boat.Having to wait till Wednesday for our visa we had to find accommodation for the next 4 nights. We had decided that we would look for something closer to the action. Fortunately our check-out from the guesthouse coincided with a very important football match on Saturday which wasn't on show until 11pm our time. The town shut down at 10 so we would need to upgrade our accommodation for one night in order to watch it! We spent the following 3 nights in the towns cheapest, grungiest place to make up for our extravagence.
Eight days in Louang Phrabang was beginning to drag, we found a nice pub which served free hot peanuts with your Beer Lao and spent many lunches there. There was also Le Cinema, which was a bamboo hut hidden away which had private rooms in which you could watch one of many copied DVD's. We were thankful when we finally got back our passports and could head onwards to pastures new.
