'Low Laos....

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Up early one morning and arriving at the Laos with only 50% of my brain working, 500B down because I spent one cheeky extra day in Thailand.... So follows a nearing overwhelming array of buses and boats shuffling us about from one place to another, filling in of forms and staggering up hills carrying 25kilos of crap.... finally we managed to make it on our slow boat that would take us for 2 days down the Mekong river to our first destination, Luang Prabang, the old capital of Laos.

The slow boat.... what can I say? If you want to truly understand the meaning of RICKETY then all you need to do is to take a peek at the seats that were to house our bums for the next 2 days. Luckily this boat had cushions.... and a floor, which was used to it's optimum capacity. What can you do on a boat for 2days? Well - play cards, sleep and read were our answers.... sometimes look our the window frame (yes, just the frame) to observe the changing riverside topography of Laos - cliffs, primary jungle, muddy village. I don't mean to do it down in the least, it was actually fairly stunning and at no point did I get bored. But then there were also plenty of other travellers on the boat, many stories to exchange etc. etc.

Our stop for the first night was the diminutive little village of Pak Beng, a single 100m road with restaurants or guesthouses populating it the whole way up. A tiny place, but we still managed to find ourselves a lovely little guesthouse that only ripped us of a little bit and a slap um Indian meal.... who'd have thought? It was just a short stop and we hopped back on the boat the next day, I finished my books, A Thousand Splendid Suns, which, let me assure you is utterly stunning and you should definitely read it. Khaled Hosseini - a literary genius. The rest of the day was spent in similar fashion to the previous, until we arrived in Luang Prabang, a beautiful little place filled ot the brim with French-colonial style town-chateaus. We spent a couple of days here, mostly because we found somewhere where we could fill our plates with vegetarian buffet for approximately 30p. We also found a terrific guesthouse run by a family (Mamma and Pappa and their 4 daughters) called Oudophone. If you ever go to Laos I would highly recommend staying here, there are limitless lovely bananas, coffee, green tea and water, and they kept coming by and giving us bits of whatever they are eating. The whole of Asia, pretty much, is big on food sharing. It's lovely and friendly and I'm going to try it when I get home....

Our time in LPB was spent largely wandering round the little town looking for breakfast, though we did manage to fit the odd thing-of-note in. We went to the museum in the former royal palace, which oddly felt a lot like a larger version of the playmobil castles I used to build.... containing the solid gold standing buddha for which the town is named, and numerous displays of gifts from a wide wide range of countries, but none from the UK. I bet we sent them gift vouchers.

We climbed up a hill in the middle of town with a little wat on it (Wat Phu Si) for sunset over the hills and the Mekong.

We spent an afternoon at some waterfalls, we wandered up to the largest and then decided we couldn't be bothered to get right to the top and spent the rest of our time swimming in one of the lower-down pools, leaping off an old tree and a little waterfall. It was very cold but lots of fun....

We even managed to get up at 5.30am one morning to go and give alms to the monks. We got accosted by women selling us sticky rice and bananas for them. It was very strange, remembering to point the soles of our feet away from the long rows of them in their orange robes, making sure not to look directly at us as we put little handfuls of rice in their urns. After we were done we headed back to the room for a quick snooze before jumping on a tuktuk to catch our aircon bus to Vang Vieng, sadly leaving Amaya behind as she was headed to different part of the country and so our co-travels had to come to an end.

Vang Vieng is famous for one thing - tubing. You rent an inner tube (of a tractor tyre or something), get driven 3km up the river and float down it, like a real-size lazy river, stopping at bars that have been thrown up along the riverside, complete with ludicrously high rope swings that propel one right our into the river, which flows with a not-inconsiderable strength. These are drunk people. It was so deliciously un-Health&Safety, I was very keen, until we found what seemed an even better trip, we went kayaking instead.
We started about 20km up the river, and visited a couple of caves, including one with a fairly intricate system of tunnels that we explored, floating around them in inner-tubes, before getting out (this is basically underground by now) and walking and then crawling through what some might describe as stupidly small tunnels - we did had to belly-crawl a couple of times - through mud which we enthusiastically threw all over one another, before exiting and getting back into our kayaks and heading 11km down river (During which time Daniella and I managed to crash into a tree and capsize, D losing her sunglasses.....) before mooring up again for a beer at one of the bars with one of the rope swings. Now, me being me, I gainly and enthusiastically headed up the rickety wooden staircase to join in the fun, except I had very tired arms (Daniella had not been kayaking before and took a while to get the hang of steering.....and continuously paddling....) and I do not have fantastic upper body strength at the best of times. So my first attempt ended in ignominy (which you can see in a video that I have kindly uploaded to facebook) when I let my grip slip at the lowest part of the swing and landed, boobs first, in the river.. If you watch the video, when I get out of the water, I am both rearranging my bikini and checking that I still have two.... Never one to be easily deterred, I promptly (well, when I got my breath back) gambolled on up the stairs and had another go, managing this time to hold on until the highest part of the swing, and land delicately, pointed-feet first, in the river. I did it again and attempted some acrobatics - I again lost my grip in entirely the wrong place, but at least I'd had a chance to show off first.... Eventually, though, our time in the bar came to an end and we had to get back in our kayaks, and we ended up paddling most of the way home in the pouring rain. It was not so much of an issue as we were soaked to the bone..........

The next day brought aching arms and tiredness, so lucky it was that all we had to do was eat some breakfast and get on another bus to Vientiane - a VIP bus one this time. The only marked difference was that the seats one this new bus were vinyl and we both ended up with very sweaty bums. I had to catch a flight to Kuala Lumpur the following morning so I didn't get to see much of Vientiane. The things I will take away from VT are the lovely night market, and the mass of bugs we discovered accumulating on our pillows in our room whilst we were watching The Constant Gardener. We informed the manager, whose only suggestions for us was that we checked out. Happily we hadn't paid already, or I doubt if we would have gotten a refund. They apologised profusely for kicking us out of their disgusting guesthouse at around midnight, but there was utterly no doubt they weren't going to do a thing about it before renting it out again, likely the following afternoon. Luckily enough there was a hostel just round the corner so we didn't have to sleep rough, but if you DO go on that trip to Laos, avoid the Patoumphone in VT. That's all I'm sayin'.

That's pretty much it for my Laos trip, apart from the pictures (look, they're so pretty!!), I managed to get to the airport with much time to spare the next morning, which was just as well as they'd moved the flight forward by just over an hour and hadn't thought to inform me.... thank goodness for over zealous time keeping!

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Photos

Slow Boat
leaves much time for ruminating

Slow Boat
this was probably interrupting a card game

The Mekong
from the slow boat

Waterfalls
swimming area - we were jumping of the leftmost tree and the left waterfall

Alms
approaching monks

caving
the small opening through which we hauled ourselves

post-caving
must be the Welsh heritage...?

Kayaking
Team Member #1 - GRRRR!

Kayaking
Team Member #2 GRRRiggle!

Trapeze/Ropeswing
Success....

Trapeze/Ropeswing
....almost