Laos

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We arrived at Chang Khong, the gateway to Laos from the top of Thailand, and spent the night there. We got onto the boat in the morning to get to the Laos border, thinking that there would be an ATM over there so we could pay the $35 USD visa fee, but when we arrived there we were pretty much laughed at by the border control staff when we asked where the ATM was!!! So Phil had to get back onto the boat again, armed with both of our bank cards to get some money out from the cash machine back in Thailand. When we finally got stamped into Laos we didn’t know what we were doing or where we were going, someone told us that the slow boat trip was quite good, so we headed down to the pier and jumped onto the slow boat. What a mistake! We floated down the Mekong River for around 6 hours and ended up in a place right in the middle of nowhere called Pak Beng. The town is a major stop for the slow boats which run between Huay Xai and Luang Prabang, we stayed at the remote town for the night and got back onto the dreaded slow boat in the morning for another 8 hours!! The scenery was amazing but that was all.

We arrived in a place called Luang Prabang and I was glad to get off the boat, vowing to myself that I would never put myself through that again!! Luang Prabang was a really nice town; we went out in the evening for something to eat with a couple people we met on the slow boat. We stayed in Luang Prabang for a few days, we visited the palace, the Palace was built in 1904 during the French colonial era for King Sisavang Vong and his family. The site for the palace was chosen so that official visitors to Luang Prabang could disembark from their river voyages directly below the palace and be received there. After the death of King Sisavang Vong, the crown Prince Savang Vatthana and his family were the last to occupy the grounds. In 1975, the monarchy was overthrown by the communists and the Royal Family were taken to re-education camps. The palace was then converted into a museum. On the last day we went to the waterfall, the waterfall was like something I have never seen before, it was beautiful, the water was a sort of lime green colour and it was so warm, we went in for a dip and worked our way down the tiers of the waterfall till we got to the bottom, where there were two small local girls swinging off a rope swing into the water, we decided to have a go, but the small girls made us look stupid, so we decided to give up.

We left the waterfall and got onto the bus to Viang Vieng, Viang Vieng is a big backpacker haunt, and is the town where everyone goes to sit in cafes and watch reruns of Friends, over and over again, when you walk down the street all you here is “I’ll be there for you, when the rain starts to fall” coming out of every café you see. Whilst we were in Viang Vieng we did tubing, this involved getting into a tractor inner tube and floating down the Mekong, stopping along the way to jump off a platform or swinging from a 30ft rope swing, oh whilst getting drunk as well! We hired motor bikes here as well and did a tour of the surrounding areas, we traveled through remote villages and went to a cave, it wasn’t that good so we stayed there for around 5 minutes and walked back to the bikes.

After Viang Vieng we got onto the bus and went down to the capitol of Laos, Vientiane. We only stayed there for only a day as there is nothing to do there, and we got on the next bus to Pakse. When we got to Pakse we met a welsh girl called Cerys, she told us about a tour we could do on motorbike around a plateau just outside the city and asked us if we would join her, so we decided to go.

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