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Published: April 20th 2008
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Luang Probang Jan 08
We got off the tuk tuk in the centre of Luang Probang after another long bus journey. The weather was awful, it was absolutely throwing it down. We must have looked a little strange to the locals as I was wearing a summer dress and Cabbie was wearing shorts and a t-shirt. We ran to a nearby guest house where our friend Sarah and Jack were staying it was down a narrow residential road and at one point we struggled to get through as there was so many people outside having a midday party in the rain. They had a small marque with a band playing and lots of people dancing. It looked like good fun but the backpack was hindering my moves so we carried on. We met Saarh and Jack and went out, there wasn't much going on, the market stalls had all closed due to the rain so we had some food and more beer lao, it never got boring !
The next day was glorious sunshine and we went to one of the many temples. Luang Probang is very beautiful, it is very laid back like the rest of Lao but
The Orange blur comes through
They move fast them monks ! It was great to see this although far too early. They basically do a small lap within the city , there must have been around 100 monks, unfortunately i didn't have 100 bananas ! it has a lot more character than other places we had visited. The four of us arranged to do a trek/homestay with a remote hill tribe starting the next day. There were a lot of tour companies along the high street so we were worried that it would be really touristy and we would be hassled to buy tourist tat by the locals like in Sapa. We would be pleasantly surprised that that wasn't the case.
The morning of our homestay Cabbie and Jack got up at 5:30am to see the passing of alms to the monks ( the monks walk through the streets every morning and recieve donations of food/gifts from people). Sarah and I however opted to lie in and then look at the photos later on! We got a mini bus to the starting point of our trek, the first part was pleasant enough with some amusing kids walking with us keeping us entertained along the way. We stopped for a break and our guide told us that the next part would be all uphill, my god he wasn't kidding, the sweat was dripping of us! Our guide, who was himself from a hill tribe would
occasionally look back at us and laugh, he couldn't understand why we found it so hard. We eventually arrived at the first village, there were about forty families living there in huts. It had a really nice atmosphere with lots of kids playing football and lots of farm yard animals running around too. We were the only tourists there and lots of villagers came to have a look at the weird white sweaty foreigners. We were taken to a huge hut in the middle of the village, there was a party going on as there was going to be a wedding. We were greeted by some rather tipsy people and they invited us in, inside there was loud music playing and people dancing and drinking rice wine through bamboo straws from huge pots. We sat down and the bamboo straws were passed to us so we could sample some of the rice wine, it was actually quite good, much better than the potent spirit lao lao that we all unsucessfully tried to avoid. After several rounds of pass the straw a tipsy elderly man made us get up and dance. We tried to get out of it but sober dancing
infront of the whole village was inevitable, it was very funny though!
After busting some moves, Cabbie and Jack played football with the boys. Later on we started walking again to the next village where we would be staying. We walked for about two hours and when we got there we were exhausted. Our guide told us that he would show us where the bath was, Cabbie was dreaming of a long hot, bath, ha ha. We were infact taken to the nearby river where other people where bathing. I think I may have looked a little silly with my huge toiletry bag ! After our refreshing river bath we went back to the home we were staying and the family made us a lovely meal. We all slept in the same room with matresses on the floor. The next day we had a look around the village, at one point I was walking past the kitchen and I saw a poor duck being murdered! Very traumatic. We were due to go kayaking but we first had to wait as they were draining the ducks blood to drink it as it is a delicacy apparantly, we obviously gave that
a miss !
After blood drinking we headed off to go kayaking, it was great fun and all was going well before Cabbie managed to capsize us and we had to be rescued by the others! Nothing to serious, just a little dip in the river ! After a few hours kayaking we had a BBQ on the river bank and you can guess what was on the menu, yes the duck i had seen earlier! I went for the rice and veg option and then we got on the minibus back to Luang Probang. We had had such an amazing experience, all of the people we met were so friendly and we loved it.
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