Lost in the Laos forest
Trip Start
Jan 05, 2009
1
15
Trip End
Jun 30, 2009
Vientiane,
Lao Peoples Dem Rep
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
We were expecting something similar to Cambodia, big traffic, no rules, thousands of motorcycles everywhere and people trying to sell you all sort of things at every corner but we've quickly realised that Laos is quite different from Cambodia, particularly in the capital. First of all, people smile less, a lot less! Second of all, the town is very well looked after, with roads in pretty good conditions and traffic quite ordered with people behaving while driving...so we could say that Vientiane looked to us like the Swizerland of south east Asia, we felt almost at home!
The only thing that was exactly the same as in Cambodia was the heat: 40 degrees and 90% humidity which made almost impossible staying out in the middle of the day. We didn't find a lot to see in Vientiane: a couple of temples, a "golden stupa" said to contain few bones from the Buddha and plenty of bars and cafes that make it more a city to live in that to visit. So we quickly left Vientiane and started heading north to our first stop, a village called Vang Vieng. Vang Vieng is a weird place: apparently a quiet village sitting on a river in the middle of the forest...in reality the very place where young backpackers come to party at night and to recover from hangovers during the day, laying down in one of the thousands bars with "the Simpsons" or "Friends" going on loop all the day. We have to admit that we've enjoyed a couple of hours of "Friends" doing nothing at a bar...not too bad in the end!
We rented a beautiful bungalow on the riverside for 12 dollars a night. Our pride for the good deal went away as the night came: we were right beside the two noisiest disco bars of the village, with music playing ridicoulously high till late...there and then we realised we're getting old!
The key activity in Vang Vieng is called "tubing": it basically consists of flowing down the river sitting in a truck's tube. We thought it could be fun and refreshing so we got a tube and went upriver to experience it. Once at the "starting point" we realised that tubing is just an excuse to continue the party started the night before. While flowing down the river, you realised there are plenty of bars on the riverside and each of them tries to get you to drink there offering free whiskey shots. Other than that, flowing down the river was quite funny but long: we were still at the beginning of the rain season so not a lot of water and the river flowing veeeery slowly. So slowly that at a certain point we got out and go searching for a tuk tuk to go back!
After two days in Vang Vieng, we eventually headed to Louang Prabang, the key destination for us in Laos (part of the UNESCO world heritage). After ten hours of bus we got to this beautiful village sitting on the Mekong River. Louang Prabang keeps a huge European influence, mainly French, mainly in the buildings and the cafes on the riverside but it is very nicely mixed with the Asian culture, making it a great place to just walk around and hang out. We spent three days in Louang Prabang before heading towards the north of Thailand. There are four ways to go to Thailand from here: 1) the easiest, by plane...but as we are supposed to be backpackers...not an option; 2) two days boat trip on the Mekong river...apparently very very boring; 3) 6 hours on a speedboat, apparently for crazy masochist only as the so called speedboat is a micro boat, narrow and long where you sit on one line, wearing a helmet and hoping to get to destination in one piece; 4) by bus, a 14 hours trip across the mountains on a so called "VIP" bus. As you can imagine we chose the fourth option as we thought a VIP bus would be quite comfortable and we would have the opportunity to watch the Laotian nature. Well, the bus was a "V.I.C" bus (very important CARGO!), half filled with carton boxes with 5 rows of hard plastic seats without any sort of regulation for the back. We saw a lot of Laotian nature, even too much! We got to Huay Xay late at night after a trip we will remember for a while (together with the one made in Bolivia), ready to cross the Mekong river to Thailand the morning after and take another seven hours bus ride to Chiang Mai.
Soon coming, M&M's around the world, the last stop in Thailand
