Slow Boat & Luang Prabang

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Hello Jamie here, I've kicked Laura off to have another go at blogging,

To get to Laos from Chiang Mai we decided to get a van to the border and then a slow boat down the Mekong to Luang Prabang. This involved sleeping one night in Chiang Khong (Thailand) in a shabby guest house with a humourless owner, then, seeing as the slow boat lasted a slow two days, and a night half way at Pak Beng (where we found our own guesthouse, at 30 Baht a head it was a steal).

Pak Beng was a small village on the side of the Mekong, it seemed to have been mainly made up of guesthouses and a couple of restaurants and one bar (effectively advertised as 'the only bar in town'). It was actually the first place I'd seen a recycled unexploded bomb, or 'UXO' for unexploded ordnance as its commonly known it Laos (the first of many, which I'll go into more in the next blog). Another first was the Laos Kip which has made me a millionaire as there are 12,900 to the pound, ching ching! Waking up the next day was fantastic as the view across the valley with the Mekong down the middle was pretty special. The second day of the slow boat actually had much better views than the first which was pretty monotonous. The boat ride was quite fun, we managed to read a lot and had fun with the people we'd met on the boat.

Finally we arrived in Luang Prabang which was an excellent place to spend more time than you planned. The Wats were quite pretty with lots of colours; the old French colonial buildings made the centre of town look very picturesque; the people, as in everywhere in Laos were extra happy and relaxed; at the end of the day it was the baguettes and coffee that stole it for us! The Lao people, famous for chasing you down the road with your money if you've been short changed, are very welcoming and I even experienced an 'argument' in which I thought someone had given me too much change (unthinkable if I think back to India). The coffee, which comes from Laos as it was planted by the French, is very good everywhere, and the baguettes come filled at about the same size as my arm for 10,000 kip (so about 80p :P ) no matter what you have in it. This is another thing about Laos, everything comes in price groups but not in sizes, so say a beer is 15,000 kip, it will be 15,000 whether its big or small and the same for other things like sandwiches. We also found a beautiful place across a bamboo bridge looking over the confluence of the Mekong and a smaller tributary which was great place to spend some time watching trainee monks play football next to fishermen (fishing).

So after staying longer than we thought in Luang Prabang we headed to Phonsavan and the 'Plain of Jars', which at one point was 'The Most Secret Place In The World'!

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