Night Markets, Chatty monks and flying coffins

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Hello Everyone,


Ok, so obviously its not the 15th of July, its about a month later!! Sorry I've been crap this last month at updating this thing - we have been moving quite a bit and haev struggled to find decent places to load the pics up on the net, and lets be honest without he pics, its just me prattling on (saying beautiful alot!)

We were really really sad to leave Vang Vieng - The place absolutely rocks and everyone that we've met since that has been there, really raved about it! Anyways, we caught a minibus up to Luang Prabang - we didn't see any of the famed bandits on the roads. Just the usual manic driving, overtaking trucks on hairpin bends going up steep hills and in the cloads so you can't see 15ft in front of you! That said, the drive was really scenic and everything that the guide books said. You spend your time constantly staring out the windows and snapping pics at the valleys and mountains, because its so hilly, Laos still has a lot of forested valleys and limestone mountains with people that are literally living in bamboo shacks its really stunning scenery (that in any other country would make it a tourist haven) and is officially my favourite country in Asia.

Anyways we got to Luang Prabang and headed straight for the heavenly Danish bakery - I may have said this before, but god bless the French - every other colonial nation brought guns and soldiers, the French brought baguettes and chocolate eclairs! I headed off with Ian and found a guest house in the old district right between the song river and the Mekong - that was clean and only $5.

Luang Prabang IS a world heritage site and I had images of some oldly world city with elephants walking around the streets (they do call it the country of 100,000 elephants), old french villas with shuttered windows, thousands of monks in saffron gowns and opium dens full of chinese merchants!! Well two out of four ain't bad - there are lots of french style villas, and even more monks and most of them seem to be sitting in internet cafes checking their yahoo mail!

We spent the next couple of days walking around the night markets, which are really pretty and no hard sell at all (unlike the rest of asia - you've got to wake up the girls at the stall to buy something), doing the touristy stuff like the royal palace and some of the wats and trying to get in touch with the people at the Gibbon experience in Huay Xai to book ourselves onto that. At this time of year it is the buddhist lent, which is when the monks come out at an ungodly hour of the morning to collect alms (offerings) from the locals - they're not allowed to eat during the day and spend their time chanting and praying in the wats for the people that have made them offerings! It makes a visit to the temples really really authentic, we got some really great pics and some video - but we sent it all home before we got to put it on the blog so I'll have to stick it on when I get to Oz! (Sorry). Anyways we went to the famous wat xien thong and ended up sitting and chatting to a monk for a couple of hours about all kinds of things - we even got his e-mail address @yahoo.com!!

Luang Prabang was a lovely city, but perhaps a little over hyped in the guide books - the rest of Laos has just as much character and given the choice I would have spent a day less here and gone tubing in Vang Vieng again!!

Anyways, because we were running out of time on the visa and we hadn't managed to get in touch with the people at the Gibbon experience we decided that we would skip the slow boat from Luang Prabang to Huay Xai (it takes two days!) and opt for the speed boat or flying coffin as it is affectionately known (which was the one thing that we said we wouldn't do before we came out! - because apparently some people have been killed on them!) to try and get on their next trip into the jungle. The speed boat is a whole experience in itself - on the upside you get to shoot up the Mekong for 6 hours and see loads of stunning scenery on Asias greatest river. But on the downside you sit on the floor of a narrow boat that is little more then a hollowed out log with a 2 litre Toyota car engine stuck on the back, with a broken helmet on, your knees tucked up to your ears, a dodgy life jacket and for a couple of hours the rain just pissing down on top of you!!! In hindsight it was brilliant, but at the time the novelty wears off pretty quick! Especially with a mouthful of Mekong water that doubles up as the sewer for most of the locals en route!

When we eventually got to Huay Xai (via Pak Beng) we were told that they hadn't recieved our mails and that they couldn't fit us onto the trip to the tree houses!!! We were completely gutted, this was one of the big things that we wanted to do and we'd even endured the speedboat through loads of illegal logging rafts!! Anyways we stopped there for the night and had dinner and drinks with a nice couple from Switzerland and South Africa that we met on our boat!! The next day we hoiked the one tonne packs down to the river and jumped on a boat across the mekong to Chang Khong - Thailand, to go to Chiang Mai and eventually meet Dulcies folks in Bangkok.




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