Laos

Asia » Laos
December 24th 2009

Published: December 26th 2009

Edit Blog Post

BenSwarb

Wat Rong Khun

The "White Temple" near Chiang Rai - note the white fish in the pond!

Journey to Luang Prabang

When I left you last, we were in Chiang Mai, and preparing to make the trip to Laos.

The first step of this journey was an "air conditioned minibus", which would drive us for six hours to the Northern Thai/Laos border. The day started badly when, over an hour late, our driver turned up in a car, and then proceeded to fail miserably at tying our rucksacks to the roof rack - in the end James and I took over the process, as it was clear that the alternative would be a catastrophic bag loss at some point during the day.

However, the day did improve, and together with an Aussie guy, and a mother and daughter pair from Gateshead (Tanya and Alannah), we made our way North. There were a couple of notable stops on the way: some hot springs just south of Chiang Rai, where the locals were boiling eggs; and Wat Rong Koom, an all-white temple, complete with white fish in the surrounding ponds, and some bizare murals on the walls inside (Buddist imagery, mixed up with pictures of the likes of Superman and Keanu Reaves).

Then, just as we

Wat Rong Khun

Strange sculptures as you cross the bridge to the temple

were beginning to lose faith in our driver (who despite claiming to do this journey "5-6 times a month", seemed to have no idea where he was going) we arrived in the Thai border town of Chiang Khong. Our room for the night was at the TNK guesthouse, which offered rooms for 150 Baht a night (c. 3 quid). It quickly became clear how they managed to make a profit despite such low rates - zero expenditure.... The lock on our door didn't work, the curtains on the window were held together with plasters, and the shower I'd been looking forward to all day didn't work. Taking one look at the flea ridden beds, we decided it was time to break out the sleeping bag liners.

The next morning we were taken to the edge of the Mekong by the woman running the guesthouse/travel agency, who the night before had charged us all 50 Baht to get the Thai exit stamps on our passports to "avoid the queues" - it was a strange experience to realise that I had now officially exited the country, and yet was still stood there - basically we had no choice but to cross

Mekong Speed Boat

Our roomy 6 hour boat trip

the river and enter Laos!

Formalities at the border were less complex than I'd feared, and were sped up slightly by us having paid the hotel in Chiang Mai to arrange our visas. However, I think that the friendly Ann did stretch the truth a little when she told us that was our only option if we wanted to avoid another night's stay at the border whilst they processed our visas on arrival (people without visas appeared to be delayed by 10 minutes at the most - and we ended up having to wait for them anyway!). After we'd crossed he border, we were quickly plucked out of the crowds heading for the 2 day "slow boat" journey and driven to the "speed boat" dock.

Mekong Speed Boat

When I had first told people at work that I was planning on visiting Laos, I was told by our new graduate Holly that I should definitely "avoid the death speed boat" which she had travelled on the year earlier. Having listened to her stories this sounded like good advice. However, I hadn't factored James into the equation, who refused to spend two days on a slow boat, when

James on the Speedboat

James putting a brave face on the experience - note the windswept hair!

he could do the journey in one day on a speed boat - given the look on his face, I knew better than to argue with him.

As soon as we sat in the boat we knew we'd made a horrible mistake - we estimate that we probably each had an area of about 50 cm square to sit in. This did not mix well with the fact that I'm not the most flexible of people, and do have reasonably long legs.... I can honestly say that the six hours spent in that boat were some of the most painful in my life - I didn't even seem to care that we were heading towards large rocks at breakneck speeds without crash helmets on (although they were provided in the afternoon, when worryingly, even our driver wore one!), because at some points crashing would almost have been a welcome release from the pain. Notably, James turned to me 30 minutes into the journey and shouted (over the roar of the large engine 60 cms behind our heads) "OK Ben, next time there's an important decision to be made, you can make it" - I will remind him of this

Speedboat trip

Semi-arty photo of the spray from the back of the boat

next time he wants to do something that may kill me.

We got to our destination, Luang Prabang, in the early evening, quickly found ourselves a guest house, and collapsed. the next day I decided to take a look at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office's travel advice to Laos, an extract of which I've copied out below:

Travel on the Mekong River by speedboat is dangerous, particularly in the dry season, November to April. Life-vests and crash helmets should be provided and worn. Incidents of drowning have been reported.

sorry mum....

Luang Prabang

For those of you that aren't fully up to speed on your Laos history, the country was run by the French for the first half of the twentieth century. As a result, their attitude towards food is more Western than we'd experienced in Thailand, with a variety of pancakes and baguettes available.

Luang Prabang is a World Heritage site, and has a very nice French colonial style old town. However, the two full days we spent there weren't the most productive of our trip so far - characterised by eating, lying around, eating, reading and more eating.

There was a brief worry on our second night, when we realised that we'd made the mistake of staying in the pub until 22:58 (all pubs close at 23:00 in Laos - or at

Luang Prabang Buddhas

James being culturally insensitive and copying the Buddha's Vulcan salute

least are supposed to...) - our guesthouse had a curfew of 23:00, so we broke into a quick jog across town (which incidentally, I won - with James taking a wrong turning). We arrived back at the guesthouse ten minutes late to find the front door closed, but not locked - creeping in and taking our shoes off in the reception, we realised that the guy who ran it was fast asleep on a wooden bench inside a mosquito net. This raised a very important question - if the locals sleep in mosquito nets, why didn't we have any in our room???

Our next destination was Vang Vieng, which required a six hour bus journey through Northern Laos. The scenery en route was stunning, with strange shaped limestone hills across the whole route. The road was equally impressive - full of hairpin bends and dramatic descents. We also learnt a few fundamental rules about driving in Laos - the horn is used when overtaking, approaching blind corners, passing pedestrians, speeding up, slowing down, turning - basically every possible manoeuvre. The last hour or so of the journey was of particular worry to me, having read some other advice on

Luang Prabang

Old anti-aircraft gun emplacement on the hill in Luang Prabang

the FCO website:

You should be particularly vigilant when travelling by road on Route 13 from Vang Vien north through Phou Khoun, to south of Luang Prabang. Armed bandits have carried out attacks on this route and two foreign nationals were killed in 2003. Local law enforcement agencies in Laos have limited capability to counter these threats.

Fortunately, on this occasion our bus managed to avoid any bandit attacks - maybe it'd be best in future if I just didn't read the government's travel advice, I'm starting to think it's just alarmist...

Vang Vieng

We were dropped by the bus at a bus station, and turned down the hordes of tuk-tuk drivers waiting for us, as we smugly each held maps of Vang Vieng which indicated that it was a 5 minute walk into the centre of town. We set off down a dirt road, which seemed to go on forever - I concluded that we had to be heading in the right direction, based on where the sun was in the sky - James thought we were probably heading 90 degrees in the wrong direction, and also added the extra suggestion that as we were now closer to the equator, technically the sun should be almost directly above us. What followed was a long discussion about spheres, the direction of light, and other engineer type points. Ultimately, we decided that nothing seemed right, and headed back to the bus station, on the way comparing our two maps to

Monks in Luang Prabang

Monks crossing the bamboo bridge in Luang Prabang

find that North was 90 degrees different on them.... To cut a long story short, Vang Vieng now appears to have a new bus station, which is not mentioned in either the guide book or the 2009 tourist map - but which is probably 5 kms out of town. Grrrrrrr

Being dropped off in the small town of Vang Vieng is a bit like entering a South East Asian version of a crappy Spanish holiday resort. We also noted that it was a bit like stepping onto the set of Logan's Run, where everyone over the age of 30 was killed (those of you that haven't got any idea what I'm talking about should watch more 70s sci-fi films!). Suffice it to say that at 28, we were starting to look over our shoulders...

Tubing

The next morning we set out to do what every visitor to Vang Vieng does - go tubing. This involves going to one of the official tube rental offices (tubing is an official cartel in Vang Vieng), and renting a large tractor inner tube. A tuk-tuk is then loaded up with c. 10 Western tourists, with their tubes strapped to the roof,

Tubing

View of the first tubing bars in Vang Vieng

and drives you 4 kms out of town. Based on various conversations, and a look at the guide book, we'd expected to spend a lazy day floating down the river, with maybe a couple of stop-offs at bars set up down the river. We were planning on taking it easily though, as the Rough Guide did say: "be warned that alcohol and tubing don't mix; there have been a number of drownings on tube trips in recent years"

What we found was a massive array of bars pumping out loud music, many with swings/slides into the river. When a lady at the first bar handed us free Laos Whisky shots, we realised the day might get messy... We decided to avoid the chaos at the first bar, and got into our tubes to head to the next bar downstream. What followed has become a little hazy in my memory, as it was a day long pub crawl, with the slight difference being that you travel between pubs by tube. The notable experiences of the day include:

• James using a zip line into the river, performing an impressive somersault at the end, before entering the river feet first

Tubing

Ben enjoying floating down the river in Vang Vieng

(although this did result in a persistent shoulder injury, that he's moaned about ever since);
• Meeting someone from Leyland, who was stood at a bar ordering a chip butty (probably not that notable, but it seemed bloody weird at the time);
• Realising that everyone else gets out at the last bar (2kms away from town), and then gets a tuk-tuk back. Unfortunately we only learnt this afterwards, and spent the last hour of the day virtually alone, cold, and with no more beer to sustain us. Luckily we managed to grab onto the back of a passing boat ferrying Chinese tourists to laugh at the silly Westerners, and were pulled some of the way back to town.
• James telling me that he hadn't seen me that drunk for 10 years

We made a lot of plans about going tubing again the following day, but unfortunately we woke up to find that the weather wasn't quite so nice, and we were suffering from minor Beer Laos hangovers - James' made even worse by an extreme case of "Laos belly". Consequently, day 2 in Vang Vieng was somewhat more subdued than day 1, and involved sitting in some

Tubing

James enjoying floating down the river

of the many bars in town which played either Family Guy or Friends on repeat.

Kayaking

The next day we set off for the capital Vientiane, opting to do so by kayak rather than take the 3 hour bus. This is slightly misleading, as the day started with a 1.5 hour ride in a jumbo tuk-tuk, and finished with a 2 hour ride in a minibus (the driver of which seemed to think it was OK to stop and pick up random locals, squeezing them into the back with the rest of us).

Between the two journeys we did spend about 2 hours kayaking, the first and last hour of which were fairly peaceful, as we glided through still waters past more very impressive scenery. However, the main memories of the day concern the mid-day stop at the rapids, which our guide took us up to see, and then proceeded to point out every rock that we should try to avoid. This worried me slightly, as we'd already managed to run aground twice with no current whatsoever, and seemingly had little control over the direction our kayak went in (James blamed his bad shoulder).

Seeing our

Beer Laos and Christmas Tree

Ben in one of the tubing bars in Vang Vieng

apprehension (and maybe having seen the videos of James and I trying to "negotiate the icy waters of the Ourika River" in City Chase Marrakech), two of the guides went down first, to show us how to do it. Both of them ended up in the water as they came out the bottom...

A Canadian couple in the group decided to brave it, and so did a couple of the girls (albeit it with guides sitting behind them and doing all the paddling/steering), whilst the other British couple (Sam and Sarah) took the sensible option of sitting it out - we therefore felt it was important to put our fears aside and prove that we could do it too. Cue the two of us managing to negotiate the first 25% to almost-perfection... and then catastrophically capsizing, just about where the guide had told us to make sure we didn't go over.... The next ten seconds or so seemed to take forever, as I was stuck under the water, and struggling up for air. Finally my head popped up and I grabbed a breath, before being sucked under again, bashing my back against a rock in the process. We quickly

Tubing

Stunning backdrop to a day's lazy pub crawl

swam to the edge of the lower pool, and clambered out, relieved that it was over, and we could watch another tour group go through the same torture we had...

Vientiane

Next stop was Vientiane, where James and I ended up spending four nights. Despite being the capital of Laos, it's quite a sleepy place, a world apart from the hustle and bustle of Bangkok.

As has become customary, we spent most of the first day arranging our onwards travel to Vietnam - a particular concern after Sam and Sarah had worried us about the flights being expensive if you don't book early enough. We managed to get seats on the next available Laos Airlines flight, on Christmas Eve, and then visited the Vietnamese embassy to arrange our visas. On the way we stopped off at Patouxai - the Laos version of the Arc de Triompe. I suspect that the designer had only ever seen the French version in photos, because it wasn't exactly a carbon copy! One thing they do well though is maximise the opportunity for money making, with stalls and shops at every level on your way up!

The following day we

Vang Vieng

A more peaceful evening view of the Nam Song in Vang Vieng

decided to visit Vientiane's water park, which had only opened 18 months ago, and we figured would be a fun way to spend the day. Despite the warnings about queues on the website, we arrived at midday - peak time. Luckily there were no queues, so we paid our money and headed in - as we walked into the complex we thought something was a bit strange, as the place was silent. We turned to the corner to find that there were only four other customers! All of which were British, and who were using all of the functioning sunbeds... However, we had a good afternoon, and the water slides (those that were turned on anyway) were great.

Having read the Travelfish website, we decided to spend the next morning at the shooting range, before heading back to the Vietnamese embassy to collect our visas. Unfortunately, it has since been closed to tourists, so we had to be a bit more cultured and make do with the National Museum of Laos. The largest part of the museum is reserved for exhibits relating to the French and American "imperialists", and their diabolical attempts to enslave the Laos people. There was

James Kayaking

James taking it easy in the captain's seat (note that I had to sit with my back to the river to take this - which I was not happy about...!)

also quite a bit of Soviet memorabilia, with no Communist museum complete without a statue of Lenin (Pete - you'd have loved it!).

Laos injuries

James' shoulder (impaired movement - zip line)
Ben's back (bruising - kayaking)
James' bowels (extreme inconsistency - Laos water?)
Ben's thumb (sliced open - razor)

Learning Points

Neither my mum nor Laura would appreciate Laos' view towards health and safety
Unbelievably, Holly was right
Speed boats sound cooler than they are
Alcohol and tubing DO mix
Zip lines and alcohol don't mix
We still can't kayak
Work have lowered their standards since I've been away, by promoting both Marks and Falzon
The best mojitos in the world are served in bamboo buckets
Local woman in Laos enjoy giggling at James (he's decided he must look like a local celebrity...)
Maps of Laos are not always to be trusted
All our guesthouses have building work going on next door
Nothing makes James happier than breaking high value bank notes (not so bad in Thailand where they were worth 20 quid - but fairly pointless in Laos where they're worth 4 quid)

Additional photos below

Photos: 21, Displayed: 21