Further indolence in Laos

Had a pleasant few days in Luang Prabang, achieving very little but enjoying a bit of downtime after a busy week. Well, busy by my current standards. Luang Prabang is a UNESCO-protected heritage city full of charming French architecture. It's a nice place to wander around, and most people here are doing the same thing as me: relaxing. Including all of the locals, who would wipe the floor with even Jamaica in an Olympic Chill Relay. There is a Laos-wide drinking curfew of midnight, so all of the bars shut early, but there is a bowling alley always open on the outskirts of town where virtually every farang in LP goes after hours for a spot of drunken ten-pin action. More of an excuse to continue drinking, but fun all the same. That night some enthusiastic locals plied us with the local firewater, Lao lao: it is easily the nastiest booze I have ever tried, and even makes absinthe seem as smooth as Ovaltine.

After a couple of days in Luang Prabang I got a ride to Vang Vieng, a few hours south, a town with a reputation as being there just for farang. It was. Either you go tubing (floating languidly down the river sitting in big tyres), drinking, or sitting in one of the myriad restaurants playing back-to-back episodes of Friends and Family Guy all day. I hated the place almost on sight. It wasn't so much the place itself as the rude and obnoxious travellers there (mostly of the English variety). It felt like an Asian Faliraki. However I did manage to have one great night out there, mainly because I was with Ben (a friend I met in Colombia, and we had arranged to meet later in Luang Prabang) and his lovely Danish girlfriend Cecelia.

From Vang Vieng it was a three-hour journey south to the capital, Vientiane. You would be forgiven for thinking Vientiane a sleepy, provincial town - but it is indeed the capital. There I met some Spanish guys who I spent a couple of days with and a girl called Steph, who I had previously met on Ko Pha Ngan a month earlier and at various places in Laos. We checked out the Laos National History Museum, which gives a decent chronology of Laos history. It is the most bombed country in the world, and being landlocked and between two Southeast Asian superpowers, Thailand and Vietnam, has had a long history of takeovers and wars, as well as colonial rule from Paris in the late-19th century and the first half of the 20th. Laos gained independence in 1953. Still officially a communist country (there are hammer-and-sickle flags everywhere alongside the Lao flag) the museum was extremely biased, and its tone was clearly set by the Lao government. A caption alongside an American machine gun read "Weapon used by the American imperialist to cruelly oppress the Lao people". Also went to have a peek at a major Vientiane temple and their faux Arc De Triomphe on the main highway. Finished the day with a couple of beers on the banks of the Mekong watching the sun go down.

After a couple of nights in Vientiane I took an overnighter to the most southerly point in the country, the 4,000 islands. Here, where Laos borders Thailand and Cambodia, the Mekong widens, and at there are lots of (possibly something like 4,000) little islands studding the brown waters. Some are bigger than others, such as Don Phon and Don Det, where I stayed overnight. I hired a bike and went across the two islands, which are joined by an old railway bridge. Discovered a big waterfall, a huge sandbank on the Mekong (optimistically referred to as a beach by guides) and spent a lovely few hours biking past saturated rice fields and lazy water buffalo. I also got caught in a frenetic storm which soaked me through - it was at this point that my chain decided to fall off my bike several times!

After a night in Laos I decided I was ready for a new country - Cambodia. It will be the 14th and final country so far on my trip. After the border crossing (easy enough, despite the fact it was "not an official border") I caught a bus to the capital, Phnomn Penh, from where I currently write. The 'Pearl of Asia" deserves and will later receive a full blog of its own...

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