Advertisement
Published: November 2nd 2010
Edit Blog Post
After a 5 minute boat trip across the Mekong River, we arrived in our second country, Laos. Passed through immigration and caught a public bus for a 5 hour trip to Luang Nam Tha. Lao roads aren’t the best, it was a pretty bumpy and dusty ride!! Arrived in Luang Nam Tha and found a great hostel called Zuela. We decided to book on a kayaking trip whilst here which involved 25km of kayaking and 2 stops at local tribal villages. The villages were really untouched by western influence and Luang Nam Tha is big on ecotourism so that wasn’t having any negative effect on them either. It was great to see how happy these people are living what are very simple lives compared to ours. We had lunch in the chief’s hut in the second village, sitting cross legged on the floor, eating with our fingers out of banana leaves, it was great! Katie had the stickiest rice ever and spent a good 10 minutes removing it all from her hands much to our amusement! After we ate, Tong our guide produced a bottle of Lao Lao, the local rice whiskey. He proceeded to hand us shots of it until
the bottle was finished, thanks Tong. After our lunch break we went for a walk around the village and decided to buy a couple more bottles of Lao Lao from the chief for the evening. We spent some time swimming and Dan had a race across the fast flowing river which he won hands down! We carried on down the last stretch of river and Tong made us take a pit stop for some more Lao Lao. This made the rapids more interesting once we returned to our kayaks for the last few km. This was especially difficult for Seb who ended up a lot more damp than he would have intended, mean while the rest of us gathered together the belongings out of the upturned boat of our instructor who was also a bit worse for wear. It was a brilliant day and needless to say we all ended up in bed particularly early that night.
The next day we awoke early to catch the painstakingly slow and bumpy 9 hour public bus to Luang Prabang. We were pretty underprepared and only had a bottle of water and some mints between the 4 of us and the bus
didn’t stop for the first 6 hours of the journey! We have now learnt our lesson and stock up on snacks and drinks before each journey we make! Luang Prabang is a town on a meander of the Mekong River which used to be a French colony which is reflected in the architecture; the whole town has been designated a UNSCO heritage site and we could understand why. We stumbled across Hmong night market which we could have spent a small fortune in, it was all locally homemade and not the tourist tat we had gotten used to. The next day we hired bikes and continued to explore the town on “Dan’s cycle tour”. We visited several Wat's, crossed the river on the old foot bridge and stopped at the Hive bar for some beers to plan our evening ahead. We were all keen to try out the food market (where we ate the best BBQ pork Dan had ever tasted) so headed that way before making a pit stop for Laura and Kate to purchase a much anticipated bottle of wine - far better than the beer Lao and Lao Lao! We got up at 6am the following day
to witness the spectacle of giving alms to monks, who every morning leave their Wats to walk around and collect food donations from locals, it was lightly raining which made it a almost magical experience. Reluctantly we moved on the next day - we could easily have spent a week here!
We prepared ourselves for a 5 hour minibus ride to Vang Vien, Laura had a bad feeling right from the start. After cramming 12 people into the tiny mini bus and driving about 10 minutes, they made us move onto a different bus of the same size. An hour into the journey the bus broke down on a hill in the middle of nowhere. Fortunately we kept in good spirits thanks to the local shop which we found which was able to supply us all with more beer Lao. An hour later a new bus arrived (this one only with 9 seats, they don’t think these things through very well!) but we were eventually on our way once more. The unexpected break, coupled with terrible visibility in the mountains and horribly windy roads resulted in us enduring another 9 hour journey! We were all tired and after battling
with the tuk tuk driver to take us to our preferred destination, ended up checking into the cheap accommodation which was closest and not the nicest. The following day however was a very good one and the single reason for our visit to this small town in the middle of nowhere; TUBING. Tubing is a well known activity endorsed by any seasoned traveller, the aim to get from the start to finish via various bars on route floating down a river on a tyre inner. We ensured a good breakfast before picking up our tubes and getting our arms and hands labelled like cattle on the way to slaughter house. We jumped on the tuk tuk and headed for start line. We arrived at bar one and Dan and Seb were straight up the ladders to the massive trapeze swings that threw them into the water, followed further downstream by zip lines and aggressive water slides. We met loads of friendly faces on route, played the infamous “SLAM” drinking game with some New Zealand guys and happily drank the free Lao Lao shots (not so happily in Laura’s case after the Kayaking experience!). Laura and Kate also found the mud
bath at the aptly named mud bar and came back covered head to toe! We all had a brilliant day and apart from a few scratches from the rocks in the river, made it back to the hotel in one piece on another day that ended pretty early! Again, we would have loved to stay a few more days here to do it again (we met people that had been there a week doing it every day) but we still have so much to see that once was all we could fit in.
We took yet another bus to Vientiane the next day once fully recovered (luckily this one was only 3 hours long). Our main aim here was to get our visa's for Vietnam. We explored the city on foot visiting the most scared temple in Lao - Pha That Luang, saw the Patuxai (an Arc de Triomphe replica) and had a good evening bowling on the last night. Like with Bangkok, we were a bit disappointed by what the capital had to offer, it was by far our least favourite stop in Lao.
After 9 days it was time to say goodbye Lao and good morning
Vietnam. Despite being a very underdeveloped country the locals we met all seemed happy with their way of life and we thoroughly enjoyed our time travelling there. We would love to come back to explore Southern Lao, but that will have to be saved for another trip.....
xx
Advertisement
Tot: 0.16s; Tpl: 0.014s; cc: 7; qc: 45; dbt: 0.103s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb