The Ancient City

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We decided to take a air conditioned nicer tourist bus from Vang Vieng to Luang Prabang. It was $3.00 more expensive but we figured heck why not. And besides regular busses used to get blown up by rebels a few years back so they're safer!
It was a dumb idea because the air conditioning didn't work and the bus was as horrible as the local busses.
And getting blown up isn't the danger, that stopped years ago, it's the incredibly skinny roads on the sides of steep mountainside that was dangerous. Especially since the driver was speeding the whole way passing trucks. It took 7 hours on the curviest road I've ever seen. One of the scariest rides of my life!!



Luang Prabang is an ancient city. More recently in the mid 1800's it was a beautiful French colonial city. It's been restored to look architecturally exactly the same as it did back then. The entire city was declared a world heritage site.

We didn't do too much in the 3 days we were there except chill out. We ran into some people we had met in Bangkok. It's funny because in all these places there's two cultures going on. There's of course the Lao culture and then the backpackers culture. Everyone seems to be doing pretty much the same thing as us but in different directions and lengths of time. We've met a lot of friends so far and are rarely alone. It's not uncommon to be sitting at the table with someone from Brazil, France, London, Ireland and Sweden.

Restaurant service in Laos is horrible. They're great friendly people but just haven't got the idea of how to serve people yet. Every meal would be wrong, once we ordered breakfast and mine didn't show up. And always one person would get a meal then literally 30 minutes later the next person would. It's all pretty humorous I guess. Typically it would be one lady cooking on one burner while watching her kids, but the restaurants weren't so good either

One one of the days we took a 1 hour tuk tuk ride to some turquoise blue waterfalls, very beautiful. Unfortunately my camera ran out of batteries so I could get pictures of the 200 foot+ waterfalls but did manage a pic of these ones. The limestone makes natural pool on top and underneath so these were great for jumping off of and cooling down.



Another day we took a small boat ride to the Pakou Caves. It's where for over 1000 years people have been putting thir unwanted buddha images. Then we went to a tribal whiskey Village. Pretty interesting day.

As some of you may have read from my preblog @ http://agrojazz.blogspot.com we had a choice of taking a slow boat or a speed boat. For safety reason we took the slow boat. ugh If I ever do this trip again I'm spending the extra money and flying. It was slow very slow. We sat on hard wooden benches for two days stopping in tiny unfriendly cities not worth mentioning. (Pakbeng) Then on the third day we crossed the Mekong River into Thailand and took another 8 hour bus ride. Finally arriving in Chiang Mai.

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Photos

Village Girl
She uses the umbrella to protect her and the little baby on her back from the sun.

Waterfalls
Jumping from the top of these feels like paradise!

French Architecture
Luang Prabang pretty much looks the same now as it did during colonial times 100 years ago

Slow Boat
This is the Slow boat, we sat for 2 days for hard wooden benches to get to the border of Thailand. Laos is definatly worth it though!

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[Joanne Barevich]

Dave Jacksons Travel Log
Dave Im so proud of you be safe i love you Aunt Joanne