27/10/12 to 31/11/12. Luang Prabang has a strict rule. Everything closes at 11.30pm to preserve a midnight silence. As luck would have it, our bus arrived 3 hours early at 2.30am, when nothing was open. Our plan was to take the bus overnight, arrive in the morning and avoid a night’s accommodation. We were so tired we had to get a decent sleep in a proper bed, so we decided to get a hotel for the few hours of night time that were remaining.
Everybody we’d met had told us how beautiful Luang Prabang was, so we had high expectations by the time we arrived. We weren’t disappointed. It’s a touristy place yes, and quite a bit more developed than anywhere else in Laos, but being a Unesco heritage site, its development had been restricted to traditional style buildings, in a lovely mountain setting, bordered by two rivers.
After a tough nights travelling to arrive, we took it easy the first day, wandering around the palm tree lined avenues, observing the wooden facades, visiting a few golden Vats, and eating in the night market. The next day we climbed the hilltop overlooking the city to see the various Buddhas along the way. Halfway up, we stopped to see another “Foot of the Big Buddha” . We’d seen one in Champusak, one in Vang Vieng, and this was the final one of three as Buddha allegedly strode across Laos (he must have been drunk or trying the Triple Jump as they’re not particularly evenly spaced). As we looked something dropped from the roof and Flora stared at it and pointed in disbelief. I stared down to see a blue and white striped Gecko sitting there. We thought he was dead as we couldn’t seem to scare it into jumping away. Eventually he went crawling off. At the top of the hill by the Stupa we had a fabulous panoramic view of the city, the hills and the Mekong and Nam Khan rivers.
The next day we hired a tuk-tuk along with a French couple (JB and Laeticia) we’d met on the bus from Vang Vieng. We went to visit the Kuang Si waterfall in the morning, followed by the Tad Se waterfall in the afternoon. The Kuang Si reserve included a bear rescue centre where we saw some black bears having fun and playing in a pond. We then made our way up the waterfall before swimming in the florescent blue waters.
In the afternoon at Tad Se, we again swam in the lagoon at the bottom of the falls, and saw some elephants taking a bath with some tourists. On our return by longboat to the tuk-tuk pick up point, Flora took a tumble and ended up in the river, luckily she was alright and gave everyone a good laugh.
We made the most of a nice guesthouse, with a good host, decent wifi and some nice places to eat. We found it a great place to relax and ended up spending the best part of a week there. We had time to enjoy good restaurants set up in very nice gardens or near the rivers, bookshops, antiques shops, a huge night market with lovely handcrafted products, stunning temples and a great city atmosphere.
I (Dave) went to a pub to watch the Southampton vs Spurs game as it was advertised earlier in the day on a poster outside. With the clock on 80 minutes and with the score at Saints 1 – 2 Spurs, the barman asked if I minded if he turned it off as they were closing. I obviously said that yes I minded as it was a close game and there were still 10mins left. He didn’t seem to understand. I (Flora) was laughing so much as I didn’t give a toss about the game but could see Dave’s face being more and more stunned. I (Dave) reasoned with him and he told us to cross the road to their sister pub who were also showing the game. We did as he said to find that they had turned it off too and were closing soon. After 5 of the 10 minutes had past I finally persuaded him to turn the screen back on (after appealing in a calm, Lao style way to the Buddhist in him and hinting at some bad karma if he didn’t do the decent thing). Luckily Spurs held out in typically nervy fashion for the win. On our return to the guesthouse, we found our host and a couple of Man Utd fans (amazingly enough, actually from Manchester), watching Man Utd beat Chelsea, which rounded off a good evening. I’m about to get told off for talking about football too much, so over to Flora.
[yawn] Thanks Dave.
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