World Heritage Site City
Trip Start
Nov 15, 2006
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101
228
Trip End
Jul 15, 2008
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Luang Prabang,
Lao Peoples Dem Rep
Friday, June 1, 2007
Luang Prabang, Laos
We've heard lots of good reports about Luang Prabang so we have taken a bus here from Vientiane. Our bus tickets costs 115,000 kip each. The trip took 9 hours through some beautiful country. We chose the Chittana Guest House; centrally located in the historic downtown with hot shower and western toilet. The manager put us into the best room in the house, which is the one upstairs in the back with practically our own private veranda. At only $7.00 per night we are going to be happy here. Luang Prabang is a UNESCO World Heritage site. One Frenchmen we met in Battanbang, Cambodia called it "heaven." Surrounded by mountains it is located on a spit of land between the Mekong and Nam Khan rivers at their confluence. It has the best collection of French colonial buildings we've seen yet. With a population of about 10,000 it is very quaint. It is definitely a tourist attraction, but being remotely isolated in the mountains of Laos keeps the numbers down so it's not completely over run. It seems to be a magnet for twenty-something back packers and those are about the only foreigners we see here. Luang Prabang is one of the must-see sites for kids making their S.E. Asia tour. We're not used to hearing so much English being spoken. And listening to their conversations in the restaurants we find many of them disappointingly puerile. It was so much better when we couldn't understand what people were talking about.
