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Published: September 15th 2009
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We had hoped to get a boat to Luang Nam Tha but no one else was going so we settled for the boat to Luang Prabang instead, the journey which the Lonely Planet says is horrible because they cram so many people on one boat. The journey takes two days of around 7 hours each. We were told to be ready for 9am but were still waiting to leave at 11am! We had decided it would be more comfortable to sit on the floor than the tiny wooden seats that were laid out for everyone. While we were waiting we met Sarah Louise and Rod, and a crazy Dutch man who was cycling round Laos. After about 10 minutes Sarah and I decided to make a dash up the sand dune to the shop to buy some Laos whiskey and coke to try and make the journey a bit more exciting. When we finally left there were about 10 of us crammed into the little amount of floor space up the front of the boat.
By the time we had had a couple of drinks we were having a great time and the scenery became more and more beautiful. Every so often when we were about to go into the rapids the wife of the driver would come to the front of the boat and start praying and tell us to get down, luckily there wasn’t anything that was going to tip us up!
After a long seven hours we arrived in the middle of nowhere and there was a mad scramble to get off of the boat, we had to climb up the sand dunes with our bags with hundreds of kids trying to offer us rooms.
We got up very early the next day to get our position at the front of the boat but it was a different boat so only about 6 of us could fit there, but a couple of hours into the day they took half the rucksacks from the back of the boat aand put them between us and the rest of the people on the boat, it was great like we were in the first class section! When we arrived in Luang Prabang we didn’t know where we would stay so Sarah and Rod called us over into a Tuk Tuk, the driver wouldn’t budge so we refused to pay the 50p each and walked to find some accommodation. We must have walked about 2km with all our stuff and all the guest houses were full, we were considering just sleeping on the beach when we decided we would go and stay in a hotel, we had a twin room for four of us, and it was very small but it actually worked out quite cheap. The best thing was it had a hot shower!!!
After a couple of days in Luang Prabang wondering the markets and swimming down by the river, we got a Tuk Tuk to the bus station so we could catch our bus north to Nong Khiaw. After we had bought our bus tickets we saw that our bus was a slightly larger version of the Tuk Tuk we had just arrived on. The journey was great we drove through loads of tiny villages all made from bamboo, there were chickens, pigs and children running around all over the place. When we arrived we got ourselves a bamboo hut on the river and went out for dinner in the poshest restaurant in town, it cost us about $3!
The next morning we headed an hour up the river to Muong Ngoy, a town that you can only get to by river, it was a great little place and so beautiful surrounded by mountains. We went for a hike into the forest and visited some tiny villages that were in amongst the rice paddy fields, when we stopped for dinner at one of them it took them ages to preapre our food and it was literally because they were catching the chicken and all of the vegetables were picked freshly out of the garden that we were sat next to. It was really lovely until I discovered the hundreds of bugs that I thought was some kind of seasoning, they look like baby ticks with big long prongy things above there heads, it didn’t put aaron off though, he just ate the lot!!
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