Luang Prabang N stuff

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Ok it's been a long time since we were in Luang Prabang but here's what I remember. It's a nice town with nice looking buildings with lot's of restaurants and tour agencies ready to grab your tourist money. The food was good, we had good and cheap steak and Lao salads and rice whilst we were there. We didn't see much nightlife although actually the whole town seemed pretty quiet, not sure if it's always like that. On our first full day we walked up a big hill in the middle of the town for some good old fashioned views. At night they shut a lot of the main street down for a market selling clothes and food. We had high hopes for the food but it looked a bit naff and was no cheaper than restaurants so we just had a sub par brownie. In Nepal we had the best brownie I've ever had and we've not found anything close since. The next day we went on a kayaking trip. Unfortunately because it's dry season we couldn't start from a particular waterfall which is apparently a bit of a main attraction. It was supposed to be the hot season but it was a bit chilly, still, once you get going it's fine. We started off at an elephant sanctuary where we fed them a bunch of bananas and gave them a pat. They were all rescued from logging and were apparently given MDMA to keep them working which Hayley thought was cruel but surely they'd be happier than if they weren't given it. Once on the river we saw fisherman smacking the water to scare fish into their nets, some nice mountain scenery, lots of midgie type flies and children and families BBQing or just washing their clothes. We went over some rapids which were pretty mild but we still managed to crash our kayak into loads of rocks. We went 18km overall, stopping for fried rice which we were given wrapped in a banana leaf. It was a good trip, well worth it. Ideally with more time and money we would've then headed north to do a high ropes thing in the trees, taken the slow boat to Thailand and then done some trekking in Chiang Mai but with only a couple of days we had to head back to Bangkok via two nights in the capital of Laos, Vientianne. There's not a huge amount to say about Vientianne. It pissed it down the whole time so we couldn't really sightsee (if there is much to see) so we amused ourselves by eating in the restaurants which were good as well as going bowling which killed about 10 mins. It's a nice enough city but not a whole lot going on that we found in one day. The next day it was back to Bangkok just for the day. We arrived at 5am so decided to just get a hotel room and slept til about 12. To save money we then negotiated a 'free' tuk tuk to the centre via a couple of travel agencies where we pretended to be interested in a package tour. Since we had time to kill why not have the last thing we do in Asia be to use the commission system to our advantage. We then went to the cinema and did some errands before having dinner and getting a taxi to the airport. Walking down Khao San Road that night we agreed that we wish we weren't leaving Bangkok yet. I'd definitely want to live there at some point (although not on Khao San Road). Anyway, next up Sao Paulo!

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