So , we arrived in 'unknown territory', not really knowing what to expect from this country, and have to say we were more than presently surprised!
We decided the easiest and probably most rewarding way to get to Laos would be by taking a boat all the way down the Mekong river and first we had to get out of Thailand. We took a bus to the border and it was really strange standing by this not-so-wide river and knowing that a different country was on the other side!!! It was great also when we arrived and discovered that Canadians have to pay the most for Visas (except for Israelis who are not in favour here!), Kyle was gutted!! Despite attempted persuasions by many to take the speedboat to Luang Prabang - our intended next destination in the end we opted for the slower, 2-day boat option, a good choice we later found out. We had heard you could catch a ride with cargo ships, but obviously there's been a recent boost of people visiting Laos, so prices have rocketed. However we were pleased with what we booked, as the photos the guy showed us of the boat looked comfortable and spacious.........needless to say the reality was rather different! Instead of holding 60-70 people more like160-170 people were rammed on this vessel, we were lucky that for some reason no one had sat at the table, so we took it, but the comfy seats were in fact plastic picnic chairs, and there weren't even enough of these to go round! It brought back memories of India where we were like 'oh we really should have got here earlier, its looking very filled' And half an hour later where there is no floor space they are still trying to fit helpful things like motorbikes on!
Although it was about 14 hours of boat ride covering 2 days, we saw some fabulous view of the surrounding mountain ranges, beaches, coves and tiny villages along the way, the weather was beautiful and best of all there was a bar on board! We met some fantastic people and had a lovely couple of days playing cards and drinking beer and eating crisps and comparing tales!
As the journey is so long we had to have an overnight stop in Pak Beng, a tiny town which seems to have struggled to cope with the sudden influx of tourists from the slow boats. The town itself, though small and pretty, was somehow spoilt by the local's attitude towards visitors, understandable i guess seeing as more visitors will be arriving tomorrow so why make the effort??? An example of this would be a scene we witnessed after dropping our bags at a pound a night guest house. We were sitting in the restaurant area waiting for friends and head yelling from the guest house next door, where a group of people from our boat were waiting outside. A girl came out, obviously distressed and it turned out she had gone to inspect the room whilst everyone else waited downstairs the owner had tried to lock her in the room, pulled out a johnny and asked her for a shag!! When some other people arrived looking for rooms, we all warned them off and then it turned out this guy's girlfriend worked with him at the guest house and she got really angry with the poor girl! It was a nightmare,we also waited over an hour for fried noodles, and had the unluckiness to have a moronic magic man join us. Fair dos, some of his tricks were good, great even, but it was totally ruined by his bullshit, arrogant, 'been there, done that' attitude. He was a 30odd year old American traveling with his elderly father (who was as bad or even worse than his son) and all they did was bitch and swear and brag - entertaining but somehow wrong!!!
The following day we had an early start, as we were worried that envious people who had uncomfortably witnessed the great time had the previous day might steal our precious table , and then we would be miserable like the rest of the boat. So we set off for the harbour bright and early only to be confused because our boat was no longer there - they had swapped it for another one - minus the table!!!, On the plus side we were the first on so we took most of the really comfortable fabric-not plastic seats and it wasn't an awful day!!!
We arrived at Luang Prabang late that afternoon, and were introduced straight away to the one main problem we had in Laos - finding accommodation! Understandably there are times where festivals and stuff are going on but as far as we were aware (which, lets face it, is not much) nothing was going on! Luang Prabang, however was beautiful, magical and tiny - easily covered on foot. Which is pretty much what we did whilst trying to find somewhere to stay. In the end i sat with all the bags (we had been joined now by a guy called Dave) whilst the boys went to find somewhere. Whilst they were gone i sat outside a shop and attempted to order a drink to no avail, in the end i had to go and take the coca cola light out of the fridge myself and the effort to pay for it was unbelievable! So i sat and read my book and a small girl, she was very cute, came and stared at me so i tried to have a conversation, going down the 'what's your name?" route, where you point at yourself and say 'Me , Kate' like some jungle warrior and you point at them and the go 'teeheeheehee'. So i quickly gave up preferring instead to do the 'smile and wave and giggle and pull faces' approach. It worked! She had a bag of crisps which she then dropped all over the floor, bent down and picked them all off the path and road, with a lot of patience and precision. Then she plonked herself down next to me and offered me one. Whilst not want to be rude there are some places where the 3 second rule just doesn't apply and this wasn't one of them! Next the girls Nan or aunt or relative who was the owner owner came out and said i had to move the bags as she wanted to close - fair enough, but there were like 4 massive rucksacks, 2 guitars and 4 day bags so she stood there and watched me whilst i dragged them one-by one to a point about 3 metres away and the little girl helped me, when I'd finished the bitch just sat down at the bloody table, not to eat or drink, just to sit apparently! When the boys came back me and my little friend were just sitting on this metal box and there was a little confusion looking from us back to the table and woman, i was just like 'don't ask and no don't take a crisp'.
Anyway, we finally found a room which all 4 of us had to share and it was expensive but not a massive problem because everything else was so cheap. It was then that we discovered one of Laos highlights - baguettes!!! Now, whilst this probably doesn't sound like much, bread in Asia can be a bit of an issue , in India the bread was all nans, rotis and chapatis - lovely but not quite right when you want a bacon sarnie, and Thailand had the occasional slice (often with the crusts cut off - why would anyone do that? All you get is a really tiny sandwich) whereas Laos Oh my god , best baguettes i have ever tasted and they are everywhere and cheap and freshly made yum yum.
Luang Prabang also had a decent night market where we got involved with the fisherman pants and we also brought some fabulously weird paintings that i fell in love with. We walked past an Indian restaurant and felt the urge to indulge in some tandoori chicken, which ended in disaster as the chicken was off and the restaurant owner wouldn't accept this and got really angry with us, "You English, bad people, very very bad". Luang Prabang was also the destination for the most amazing waterfall i have ever seen 9even on the trek). This was indescribable and the pictures we took seriously do not do it justice. It was like a massive turquoise heaven of deliciously cold water that flows down in tiers, so you get the magnificent actual waterfall and the all the rock pools at the bottom flow into each other and you can swim in them and sunbathe by them and have a picnic. We climbed right to the top of the waterfall, which was a bit of a mission if i do say so myself, but the views at the top were spectacular!
After a couple of days we hopped on a bus to our next stop Vang Vieng for the notorious tubing adventure!! And we ended up staying much longer than intended! We arrived really late at night and again encountered the accommodation issue. We'd had an argument with a tuk tuk driver who was trying to rip us off for what we later found out (not wanting to pay out of spite) was a 3 minute walk! In the end after an hour or so of searching (nackering with your house on your back) some Australian dude let us sleep in his back garden under a gazebo which was real cool of him, and the search started early the next day, as did tubing! Tubing is basically where you get in a rubber ring and float down the river, and there are some makeshift bars all set up along the sides and the locals hold out long sticks and if you want to stop you grab it and they pull you in and you have a beer or a bucket. You meet lots of random people, there's a lot of rope swings and flying foxes, bob Marley, drinking games and at one big bar volleyball, football etc its like a mini daytime rave! Although we were all rather gone, nighttime came way too quickly and we got separated form the group so it ended up me and Darren floating down a river in darkness until we heard them shouting us from the banks!!! I got groped by some local dude trying to 'help' me up the ladder which almost ended in a fight but got under control quickly, and we had a very early night! Our friends left the next day leaving us a present of some leftover weed they had brought so we had some very chilled days and explored the rest of Vang Vieng - i was thrilled more than i can explain to discover that of the many bars and restaurants lining the main street 95% play reruns of friends - all the different series- 24/7! I was in heaven!!! I must have spent 3 days just eating baguettes , chilling out and watching friends, a couple of times i compromised and moved across the road to family guy, but i wasn't happy about it! We also got quite into LOST in Vang Vieng, the 3 of us huddled round the tiny screen waiting to find out what happens! We are the true backpackers!
Once we got out of our lazy stage and decided to be productive we rented out some granny bikes(complete with baskets and everything) and went on an exploring hunt for caves. It had been a long long time since any of us had been on bikes and we ended up biking about 40km that first day and man did my ass hurt for about a week afterwards! We had a map of the worst scale possible and got completely lost! It also didn't help that kyles chain decided to give up after about 20km and broke about every 5 minutes! Lucky for us the Laos people are so friendly and welcoming, we had so many good Samaritans trying to help us it was hilarious one by one the villagers gathered, the most funny being a guy in a towel on his way to have a shower!!! After another 6 or 7 'stops' , where we made new friends each time, young and old, we finally made it to a cave! It was quite late in the day and the cave looked a bit unwelcoming and scary but we braved it, although we were worried we might get lost, having heard many a bad story about people wandering for days. It was brilliant, but very very dark, with huge stalagmites and stalactites and numerous creepy crawlies. Every sound that was made echoed really loudly so we were constantly jumping and scaring each other. Once, we looked up and saw that the ceiling was covered in massive spiders - i felt like they were crawling all over me! It was fun though, climbing up and down and crawling and squeezing through tiny crevasses we were there for quite a long time that we really had to stop and summon up the energy to bike all the way back! W came across some school children who must have to walk miles to school everyday and they were really happy to stop and chat with us and pose for photos! Needless to say i Vang Vieng we did just the one bike ride and it took me a week to recover!!!
Our next stop was the quiet capitol (when compared to all the other major Asia cities)Vientiane, which we only planned to stay one night but made it 2 in the end, and it was here that i discovered my beloved little boy cat Walter had passed on and i cried because he was cool and i loved him very much. Again we wandered for hours looking for accommodation before we found something. We spent our days wandering around exploring Vientiane, a lovely city with absolutely nothing modern in it apart from the odd restaurant. The fountain at night was spectacular and we visited a few of the temples, and saw some amazing headstones in the cemetary surrounding it. Me and Darren spent an afternoon bowling whilst Kyle went and watched the sunset on the river, before we headed down to the 4000 islands.
These were great, tiny little examples of islands, we (after many a wander) found a place to stay which had a pig in the yard! Don Det was basically one road, and one tiny beach, but it was connected to its larger neighbour island by a bridge, so we explored on flower power bikes( minus the basket, add big tacky colourful flowers!). Don Det was very relaxed and quiet and w indulged in some of Laos's cheap whisky - it was ridiculous - more expensive to buy a bottle of coke as a mixer than a litre bottle of whisky, madness! The next morning, however, we woke up to find the biggest cockroach i have ever seen (and that's a lot of cockroaches) floating in one of our drinks! It was so big it wasn't really even floating as it was lopsided in the glass and had obviously fallen in head first! The thought of that in my room wasn't so good, and i thought i was used to them!
We made the mistake (again) of arriving without sufficient funds, so me and kyle had to do an early morning trip to mainland for dosh before we went exploring, and kyle took many a picture of this random tree growing in the middle of the river, and there were loads of buffalos just swimming about and grazing! That day, we visited a waterfall which was amazing in it's ferociousness, you wouldn't wanna be posing under that baby no way! And we also found a massive beach on a beautiful bay where we sat and got a bit burnt before we headed to the village.
On our final day, we were on the tiny beach and a really playful puppy came and ruined our card game but he was nice and silly so we didn't mind until he got sand all over the camera and broke it!!!!
Never mind, Laos was very different to any other place we had been to so far, and in a way it was nice not to know what to expect. The niceness of the locals was on par with the friendly Nepalis, they really were interested in you and helpful and welcoming, and sometimes that can be a rarity in more touristy parts of Asia.
More thumbnails ...
Luang Prabang Hotels
