A little bit of Laos
Trip Start
Sep 20, 2004
1
78
89
Trip End
Mar 30, 2005
Luang Prabang,
Lao Peoples Dem Rep
Saturday, February 26, 2005
With our usual "we'll sort it out when we get there" attitude we weren't quite ready for the guest houses all to be shut up and asleep when we arrived in town. We had also got a idea in our heads of a nice place with a balcony overlooking the river with wooden floor boards and a big fan. Well obviously so had the rest of the travellers as most of the places on the river were full or super expensive. However, as luck would have it one place was still open and had flashing neon lights outside and blaring music. In fact not only this, but they had a room available for $10 as long as we didn't mind the music until 11.30pm as the guys brother was getting married the next day and the family were giving it the large one ! No problems for us so we sneaked upstairs and called it a night.
The next day we sneaked back downstairs to be met by 30 members of the family and we started to question whether the place was actually a guest house
Hot chillies drying
. However on this important day we weren't about to ask so we left the family to the process of dressing the pick up van and went off for brekky and then exploring. The Mekong snakes lazily along the side of LP and one of the tributaries joins it at a confluence of the rivers on the east. The river is a focal point of activity and we spent the day watching the kids hurl themselves in with huge inner tubes and drifting 6 at a time down before wading back out and walking up to do it all over again. Other smaller kids had stripped off and were deep in concentration on jumping on and off a small fishing boat for hours on end. Various other people were either tending to their vegetable patches on the side of the river or casting out nets for fishing. Eventually we dragged ourselves away from our prime view point and went off to explore some of the temples. As we walked along all the kids were up to one game or another hurling themselves into huge elastic bands or carting inner tubes back along the road.
We explored several beautiful temples with fabulous mosaic designs in fabulous colours relecting the sun in the background of trees with bright purple flowers and a crowd of monks with their bright orange robes siting below the tree in the shade meditating
Luang Prabang Monk
.At dusk we climbed the hill to watch the sunset over the Mekong at the site of a small temple. We weren't the only ones to take advantage of the amazing sunset which reflected fluroscent orange in the river through the trees but it was quite a beautiful site.
We spent the evening getting a taste for the local beer which really is rather good before getting stuck into some of the local specialities - buffalo skin and chilli and fried seaweed and sesame. Actually amazing !
The next day was the doofus's birthday and we went for a tour in the morning to some caves way up the river. The caves / temple was fairy average but we met some cool people on the trip and the boat journey was a nice cruise for a few hours. The peacefulness was only broken by the screaming engines of the fast speed boats hurtling up the river with various people and bags strapped in with dodgy helmets clinging on for dear life. We assumed that they must be off to the Thai border and were pretty pleased we had decided against that mode of transport into Laos !
Spent the rest of the day lazily watching the river activity before sipping G and T's and exploring the market in the evening and tucking into some amazing dinner at the local market - best chilli noodle soup ever !!
Having been told about the bus drive to Vientenne being a particularly good one we booked ourselves on and decided to break the 9hr journey in Vang Vieng. B wasn't too impressed by the fact that I wanted to get the local bus but equally I wasn't that fussed about stopping in Vang Vieng after reading in the LP the description. Well the bus ride was long and pretty cool although the fog over the mountains obstructed the view a bit but Vang Vieng was a hit !
L
