Advertisement
Published: March 24th 2008
Edit Blog Post
What can I say the good people at Lao airlines must have seen us coming!! As they decided to have another training day for their pilots but I will say it was a lot better than the last time we flew with them. Also for anyone thinking of flying with them please do so as they are not too bad and it sure beats 10 hours on a bus .They just need to work a little on the landing part which is kind of important and as soon as they get that mastered they will be fine..
Okay we have arrived and the City is quite a surprise we booked into the Intercity Hotel which after negotiating a very cheap room rate that we promised the very smiley lady at the reception that I wouldn’t ever tell anyone!! The river front room 999 was ours and it has a fantastic view over the river front area with all the little outdoor restaurants and market areas just across the road. Settled in we headed out to look around and see some local craft shops that Barbs has been wanting to see and after walking around in the baking sun we find that
they are closed as it is woman’s day GREAT!! Since being in Laos for the last couple of weeks and watching how much work the woman folk do we start to think if its woman’s day off we are stuffed..No food, No shopping and more importantly who is going to bring us a nice cold beer Lao!!!After looking around we came across some shops that were open and ended up buying some very cool dominos and Barbs got a couple of hand bags with local designs on them. There was this one sort of market come huge shop that sold every copy of fashion brands imaginable from north face bags to designer wallets they had it all. We resisted the urge to buy anything and made our way down to the river front area.
The river front area is huge with all these 44 gallon drums cut in half all cooking chicken and whole fish. The smell was amazing and there seemed to be a bit of a carnival going on so we wondered on through and had a look in some of the stalls until finally parking up at this little bar beside the river for the well earned
bottle of beer Lao. Watching the sun set over the Mekong River with a beer Lao sure is a good way to spend the evening, But the antics of the local lads who had set up a business offering paragliding and kite lesson as well as their hot air balloon ride for 5 minutes which you have to check out the photos of their advertising sign its pure class, this was sure drawing a crowd of locals including the police and very worried looking tourists including us! When they bought the balloon out it was this old green looking thing that I’m sure hadn’t passed any safety test in god knows how long and when they got it half inflated and one of the young guys shot off and returned with what looked like some sort of duck tape our minds where made up that no matter how much we drink there is no way that we would be going for a hot air balloon ride!!! Watching a few brave locals taking their girlfriends up for a romantic rides in this death defying hot air balloon I thought that since we are on our honeymoon I would treat Barbs to
a her very own hot air balloon!!Well it wasn’t going to be the green machine that the local lads had that’s for sure so I found this young lad who was carrying around this massive bunch of balloons of all types of animals and cartoon characters and bought Barbs a Minnie Mouse balloon which she didn’t really want and tried in vain to stop me from buying, but what the hell you’re not on your honeymoon in Laos everyday!!With Barbs not wanting to have her new Minnie Mouse balloon tied to her I thought I couldn’t let it go and ended up with it tied to the camera case which wasn’t very smart as every photo we took that night has a bloody huge Minnie Mouse balloon bobbing up and down in it!!!!After having a few drinks with the two New Zealanders and British girl that are teaching English at one of the schools we headed back to the hotel with some BBQ chicken and hit the sack.
The next day was spent exploring the city we were up early and decided to go and visit one of their local markets. After trying to explain where we wanted to go
we ended up at a market that we didn’t want to go to but what the hell it was a laugh anyway. This place was huge and they sold everything as well as the cool shop that had massaging chairs and the most expensive one came to a cool $3500 US dollars so I had to have a go in the chair that looked like something out of a Star Wars movie. Getting in this thing meant having your feet clamped down and your hands place in these air bags. The girl turned it on and man was it good, I was trying to convince Barbs to have a go but after she heard all the ohhhing and arrhhhing coming from me she wasn’t too keen. Next stop we found the area that sold every new mobile on the market for a fraction of the price you would pay elsewhere after nearly purchasing a brand new Apple I phone for $20 dollars we decided against it after a few people were returning them. What happens is the traders come over from Thailand which is just over the other side of the river and sell all these counterfeit mobile phone some
are good some are very bad rip offs. So we left the market with the usual couple of T Shirts and a free massage which all in all was a pretty good result considering we didn’t even want to go there in the first place. Back in the city we found a reliable jewellery shop and Barbs got her gold charm that she collects from each place we have gone to over the last 8 years it’s a symbol of a Elephant which is a very important symbol in Lao culture as it is meant to be the land of a million Elephants but we have only seen two and one of those I rode. Time for lunch and we couldn’t resist the smell of the BBQ chicken so it was a lovely lunch of chicken sticky rice which Shayne has become addicted to, and all washed down with a fresh coconut YUM YUM YUM!!!
The lads on the river front had kites for hire so I thought it would be rude not to go down there and show them some of my handy skills since there’s weren’t too sharp after watching last night’s performance. Barbs was happy to do
this as well as it was getting bloody hot and we were all shopped out for the day, so after an two hour sessions showing these clowns how to fly a kite and losing half my body weight in sweet and most likely the 6 or 10 beer Laos from the night before we gave up and retired for a afternoon nap as it was getting really hot!!! With a couple of hours sleep we got up and headed back down to watch our last sunset over the Mekong River which was very cool to be standing on the huge sand bed where the Mekong River flows in the wet season and seeing our last sun set we had a nice meal and went back to the hotel to pack for our flight tomorrow to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon)
Next blog Saigon..
Advertisement
Tot: 0.126s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 11; qc: 50; dbt: 0.0738s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb