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After finishing the Gibbon Experience and living in the tree tops, I was pleasantly surprised upon my arrival in Luang Prebang. LP is a cute little town with something for everyone. There are some temples there, as well as restaurants, bars, shopping and some beautiful natural sights within a short drive. I was really lucky to find a nice place to stay with a helpful receptionist who spoke English very well. I ended up staying longer than most people, but I was just really enjoying the place.
In addition to going to the bowling alley, for some reason a LP backpacker “must-do”, I met some expats who took me to some local Laotian bars. Apparently, the end of the month is pay day for the locals and everyone at the bar was hammered! People were falling all over the place, knocking glasses over and one girl at our table threw up over the side of the bench into the alley. I guess if you only have enough money to drink once or twice a month, you’ll make sure you get your money’s worth! It was actually kind of funny.
Anyway, for the first few days I walked around the
town and did some shopping. LP has a great night market where you can buy the locally produced handicrafts which range from wood carvings, woven textiles, silver, paintings, embroidery, paper goods and tons of other lovely items. And of course, it’s all so inexpensive compared to Western prices. So, I went a little overboard and ended up mailing a huge package home. Oh well!
After walking around and shopping, chilling and reading for a day or two, I decided to do some tours. I headed out to the local waterfall, Kuang Si. It was simply amazing, one of the most beautiful waterfalls I’ve ever seen.
Once you arrive and pay the entrance fee, you walk a short distance thru the park, where they have a cute picnic area and an old house that is supposed to be built in the traditional Laotian style, although it had clearly seen better days. The waterfall park is also home to two animal conservation areas-more on that later.
Once you get to the main waterfall pool, there is a little bridge you go across and you can climb up the side of the waterfall to find its source. I decided I
Luang Prebang
BBQ Stall at the night marketwanted to have a look at the top so I took a walk up. It wasn’t too steep and the path and waterfall naturally seemed to break off at different levels. I kept going until I reached the top. The view was stunning and the water at the top formed more tranquil pools. I walked farther and farther back, but I couldn’t find the source.
I made my way back down to the main area and went to find the swimming areas. There were three naturally occurring pools where swimming was allowed. The water was absolutely freezing! But it felt really nice. The water was so clean and clear, just a real treat after hiking. There was a Laotian family picnicking at the first of the three pools and they asked me to join them for a beer. Unfortunately, I had to decline because the bus was heading back soon and I wanted to see the other pools and the conservation areas. The park set the swimming area up really nice and had changing rooms, huts, or whatever you want to call it. It just seemed like a great place to go on the weekend and relax and I
Luang Prebang
Pig's head for sale at the meat stall. Yum! wished I had more time. I would recommend to anyone going to arrange their own transportation instead of booking a tour so you can take as much time as you want. There is definitely a lot to explore. I walked by the other two swimming areas which were beautiful as well, but loaded with other tourists. Seems that the first swimming area was the best.
On the path towards the exit of the park, there are two conservation areas set up. One for Asiatic Black Bears and one for an Indochinese Tiger. The animals are all victims of the illegal wildlife/poaching trade. It’s really sad, but it happens here a lot. The animals are hunted for their body parts, either to be sold off in pieces for “medicinal” uses or for their meat. Unfortunately, the poachers often leave baby animals orphaned when they take the parents.
The bear compound was fun. The bears are quite small, compared to what I would picture when someone says “bear”. They’re not like a grizzly or a polar bear. They were really lazy and cute, just rolling around their enclosure with their bellies and feet in the air. One of the bears
Luang Prebang
Night Market BBQ- sooo yummy! was playing with a tire on a rope, swatting at it while he rolled around underneath. Really cute, although I couldn’t get any decent pictures because the fence was in the way and they had the bar in front of the fence too far for me to fit the camera lens through.
I went to take a look at the Tiger, and instead found a notice on the information board that she had died only days before I visited. Apparently, she had suffered with a nervous system disorder for months and had finally succumbed to her illness. It’s really so sad, the loss of all these beautiful animals. I wish there was some way of stopping the illegal trade of wild animals, but people have to stop buying the animal products. It’s kind of hard here when the culture and traditions incorporate using parts of these animals in ceremonies or for long-established medical uses. It would be easy to point the finger at these cultures and blame their traditions but the Western world has plenty of accounts of animal abuse as well. Just check the PETA website if you don’t believe me.
Anyway, I decided I wanted to
spend some more time with the local wildlife, so I decided to take a mahout tour. Mahouts are what they call elephant trainers/handlers. BTW, they only use female elephants for this kind of stuff- tourist traps, performing, circuses and stuff. Guess the males are too aggressive. I booked a tour that promised a two day mahout experience where you could learn the basic elephant driving commands, give the elephants a bath and ride them. Also, do some kayaking on the way back to the city. I wasn’t really crazy about the riding them part. I didn’t want to sit in those benches they make them wear on their backs because it looks like it might hurt them. Luckily, I didn’t have to!
We arrived at the Elephant training camp and were given a ride, where right away the mahout allowed me to sit on her neck. That was pretty nice. He taught me how to tell her how to go, turn, stop, stuff like that. Although, he didn’t speak any English so who really knows. After the ride, I was able to feed them. Of course, I had to buy the bananas, but whatever. I bought a few bunches
and the one who I had ridden excitedly came toward me to get some bananas, raising her trunk in anticipation of her reward for schlepping me around all afternoon. She didn’t like being fed directly in her mouth so I held them out to her and she guided her trunk around them, then stuffed the whole bunch into her mouth. Elephant trunks are really cute. They’re not completely circular for sniffing like you think. They are very agile and have a pointed “finger” on the top which they use for picking things up, feeling things, basically they use them as their hands. You can hand an elephant a single banana and it will use its little finger to gently hold it and put it in its mouth. While I was feeding my elephant bananas, another one came up behind me and was angling to get some banana lovin’. This one was more than happy to accept the bananas straight into her mouth. She was so gentle and I could hear the munching and crunching of the bananas as she chomped away. While I was feeding and petting her, the elephant I had ridden all afternoon snuck up behind me and
Luang Prebang
Farangs at the bowling alley stole the rest of the bananas I had set aside. I shouted Hey! and tried to get her to relinquish her grip on them, but it was no use. She wasn’t giving them back and quickly shoved them all into her mouth. Never turn your back on an elephant when there’s food involved!
And, as always my friends, there’s a darker element to my story….the first night of the elephant camp stay included a brief guided tour of one of the local villages which was located about half an hour of hiking through the woods outside the elephant camp’s hotel. I arranged to meet my tour guide and some of the other people taking the tour at 5.30pm so we could all go to the village together. When I came out of my room at 5.30 to the meeting spot, my guide told me that everyone else had gone ahead to the village already and it was going to be just us two. Ok, I thought, that’s weird, but so many things like that happen here. Most stuff is not what you’re told it will be so you really just learn to go with the flow. Anyway, we trekked
Luang Prebang
The bowling alley thru the woods and got to the village where we saw the other tour guide and guests a bit ahead of us. It was weird, and of course being blonde I didn’t notice at the time, that my guide kept distance between us and the group and often went the opposite way than they seemed to be going.
The village had a little café type place, although that’s using the term loosely. It was more of a mini-mart with a table. The guide said he wanted me to try some of the local food, so we had a seat and ordered a few beers while the girl cooked up some of this weird pork filled banana leaf and sausage type stuff. Not too bad. Some onion, garlic, pork fat. Emeril probably would have loved it. The guide was eating embryo eggs, apparently a fine Laotian delicacy (see attached video). I have to say looking at them really grossed me out, especially the crunching noise- Ew! Yet another reason I could never win at Fear Factor!
Anyway, the guide and I were having a fine little chat when he starts touching my legs and thighs. I politely explained to
him that this was not acceptable. He seemed to get the message but every so often, every few minutes, back again. So after a couple more of these advances and my unheeded verbal warnings, I decided I wanted to go back to the hotel. It had gotten dark by this point and this “guide” had not brought a flashlight. He managed to borrow some kind of pen light from the girl at the café but it was pretty useless.
We start heading back and after a few minutes, he tells me he’s lost. He had no idea where we were going. Now I’m getting pissed. We keep walking as he guesses at trails and we head down what doesn’t seem like a very beaten path off to somewhere in the woods. And the whole time this Ahole is asking me if he can come back to my room and sleep with me! Even though I’ve told him “No!” about a hundred times already.
During all this random ambling, we come across what must have once been a stream and there was a log or some bamboo lying across it so you could get to the other side. Of
course, its dark, I’m in flip flops and I’m kinda scared… so I fall off. Not knowing how far below the ground is, I hang on to that log with all I’ve got and manage to scrape the hell out of my thighs in the process. After I dangle lamely for a minute, I sense that the ground is only a few inches under my feet. Which is great because I’m about to drop. That’s one experience I can definitely tell you is SO exaggerated in the movies. Where they show someone hanging by one arm or something for like 8 minutes until they are rescued at the last second. Trust me, we’d all go down like lead balloons after say, 60 seconds. Anyway, I lower myself to the ground and climb up the embankment back to solid ground trying desperately to ignore the thoughts of spiders, insects, snakes and whatever else might be crawling on me at the moment.
Finally, FINALLY, this idiot manages to get us to the right path and when I see the lights from the hotel I’m overwhelmed with relief. I really didn’t want to have to sleep in the woods with this guy
until daybreak. I head back to my room, again telling him that I don’t want to sleep with him. The next morning when I woke up, I looked up from getting dressed and saw him peering into the window. Oh my God, I thought, I am going to kill this person and go to jail in Laos for ever. They’re going to make a movie about me and some crappy actress like Anne Heche will play me. Ugh!
Luckily I managed to calm myself down by deciding that I was not going to go kayaking alone with this jerk down the river for the 4 hours it would take to get back to LP. So, I waited until the next tour group arrived and went back on the bus. I didn’t say anything to the tour company because I know this guy makes almost no money and I didn’t want him to lose his job, but really I had such a bad taste in my mouth from that whole experience. It makes me gag just remembering it. Like I throw up a little in my mouth each time. But, what really makes me
mad is that even though I
showed him how to work my camera he couldn’t understand the concept of “video” so I only managed to get a few seconds of me washing the elephant in the river. Sigh~
A day or so later I ran into one of the guys who was on the tour with me and he told me that my guide insisted the group leave without me. He basically forced the other guide to take the tourists to the village without me. So, it was all a brilliant plan to seduce the dumb American blonde! Ha! Nice Try Sucker!
So, that’s about it for Luang Prebang. I also stopped in Vang Vieng and Vientiane but I won’t be blogging about either of those places as they weren’t too exciting. After I left Vientiane, I flew to Hanoi, ready for more adventures.
Stay tuned…….God only knows what will happen next!
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