Luang Prabang, Laos

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Luang Prabang? What, where? ... those would have been my questions about 3 months ago if you had mentioned this city. But in our trip reserch and travels its name kept coming up over and over again as one of peoples favorite spots. It didn't disappoint... once we got there that is. That was after a little hitch with our flight.

We arrived at the Hanoi airport for our flight to Laos just to discover it had been canceled. Well it was then that Vietnam air seemed to go above and beyond. With only one flight a day we were booked on the next days flight, but... Vietnam air then paid us $25 usd per ticket (in cash) for the trouble, drove us to a 4 star hotel that they paid for. And then they also covered lunch, dinner, and breakfast. Not bad... Oh, and of course drove us to the airport the next day. All and all not a bad delay.

We finally arrived in Luang Prabang which is really just a tiny town of about 25,000 people in the mountain region of Loas. It is safe to say Luang Prabang has been discovered with just about half of the people we saw on the street being tourists. But it still has a charm that is hard to describe. The flocks of tourists did have the benefit of bringing some great bakeries, sandwich shops, and restuarants that were some of the best we had our entire trip!

Besides tourists, Luang Prabang also has more monks than we have seen in any one spot in SE Asia. There are Wats everywhere and several monestaries where young monks study. Most monks we see are between the ages of 8 and 18. We learned later that the drums we hear every morning at 4am are the youngest monks waking up everyone else for the day. Our hotel was just across the street from one monestary.

Luang Prabang is also a big outdoor sport area so we booked a one day mountain bike slash elephant ride trip. The biking was hard but beautiful through a dirt road in the jungle. The mountain bikes our company had were excellent but unfortunately they didn't pedal themselves up any hills. During lunch we took an elephant ride and visited with the new baby elephant our company recently purchased.

We loved walking around this small and quiet town which at night turned into a large street market. A bit too large it seemed actually. It seemed like there were way more people selling than buying. Again we found great bargins on hand made silk scarfs, clothes, and quilts.

Overall we loved Luang Prabang... it may have been our favorite city on the trip.

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