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Chang Mai - Huay Xai - Luang Prabang (3days)
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From Chang Mai we got a bus up to the border town of Chiang Kong. This took something like six hours and was again pertty comfortable. The bus dropped us in town from where it's a short tuk-tuk ride to the banks of the Mekong river and the border crossing to Laos. No problems exiting Thailand, hop on a small long boat which takes about 30 seconds to cross the river, get the guy at Laos imigration to stop playing his guitar for a minute and stamp your passport... and your in Laos.
The border town is Huay Xai, it's a small dusty little town with next to no infrastructure apart from the few guesthouses and restaurantes which have sprung up in recent years to cater for the growing number of tourists. It's not dissimilar to numerous other port or border towns all over south east Asia. There's nothing to do here except arange your onward travel. In our case, and 90% of other cases this means booking yourself a place on the slow boat to Luang Prabang.
I had heard some good things about the two day journey down the Mekong, even the Rough Guide called it 'one of the great adventures or south east Asia' or something. Don't believe the hype. The trip basicly entailes you sitting on a hard wooden bench for 6 to 7 hours per day for two days. These benches are packed very close together and further stalls or plasic chairs are squeesed in the isle in the middle, while people at the back sit on whatever bag of rice they can find (the back is probably the most comfortable place actually). There were roughly 150 people on my boat, half that might have been relativly comfortable. The trip would be a couple of hours shorter each day if the driver didn't keep stopping to pick up or offload bags of rice . The scenery is very nice of course but also exactly the same for about 14 hours. The overnight stop is in a town called Pak Beng which is predictably nothing but guesthouses and restaurantes set up for the neverending flow of fresh tourists. I have no idea what the people of the town did for money before this boat trip became popular with tourists but they're doing pretty well now anyway. If you do the trip you'll probably get mobbed by the guesthouse touts at the boat landing (of course they know full well there's a boat with at least 100 people looking for rooms on the way) but in my experience this is as good a way of finding a room as any, as long as you don't pay their initial asking price of course. So we stopped for the night, had some pretty good Indian food, slept and got back on the boat at 8.30 the next morning expecting a 9 o'clock departure. On the first day there had been two boats leave from Huay Xai as there had just been too many people to fit onto one, but today they decided it was worth a go and sent the second boat back. So it was considerably more crowded than the first day and very uncomfortable. The boat didn't actually leave untill nearly 11 and then after less than one hour traveling stopped for 30 mins and did nothing. To cut a long story short i found the whole two day boat trip thing a bit annoying, uncomfortable and a waste of time.
Thankfully spirits were lifted on arrival at Luang Prabang. Luang Prabang is quite a small town (most things ae walkable) so with at least 150 new tourists arriving every day (that's just from the boat from the north, there are more from the south too) it's not exactly remote, but i wasn't expecting it to be. It's a world heritage-listed city and the former Royal capital of Laos. The architecture is full of French influence and the city is bordered by the Mekong river on one side and the Nam Khan river on the other, with mountains off in the distance and loads of palm trees and stuff... it's very picturesque. The old Royal Palace has been turned into a pretty impressive museum and theres a ton of Wats and temples and stuff if your so inclined to visit them all. (the Royal palace and one Wat will do for me). Apart from that there's a load of tour's of the surrounding area you can go on, a nice night market, loads of good European restaurants (it's actually quite difficult to find Laos food!), a few bars which open past 10pm where you can drink beer laos and watch films and some shops and stuff. There are also a couple af ATM's. So we've been here for three days, which is enough and tomorrow we're headed to Vang Vieng in an overpriced mini bus.
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