It was an uncomfortable 4 hours bus to Vientiene We were duped into buying ‘VIP’ bus tickets, which turned out to be a local bus but especially for foreigners. We snaked our way to Vientiene through an afternoon shower, something we haven’t seen in a few months. Laos’s capital city definitely doesn’t feel like your typical capital, it’s definitely more relaxed than CBD centred. Despite this being the low season- as its scorchingly hot- we had some trouble in finding a room. I left a sweaty Mal and the bags outside a café while I took my turn at scouting, eventually finding a huge room in an old mansion for $10- despite the fact that the bathroom was down the hall, this was a bargain for the city prices.
Having read about a special restaurant whose names translates as ‘Chilli’, we decided to dine for a cause that night. This special restaurant takes Laos homeless children from the streets and trains them as chefs, waiters, managers etc and all profits feed back into the organization. The venue was lovely, the staff friendly, the menu great, although we weren’t entirely satisfied with our food but will still encourage you to visit, we probably just made the wrong meal choice.
Our next day was a busy one around the city, where we managed to visit ‘Patuxai’- Vientiene’s Arc de Triomphe, Wat Si Saket- a lovely temple and the national monument Pha That Luang. We didn’t come across any busy shopping Malls or fancy hotels; although I’m sure some exist. Nor did we see even one Mc Donalds! Nice.
We only spent the one night in Vientiene, getting a local bus to the border with Thailand, crossed over and got an overnight train to Bangkok. Like a magnet we’re back in Bangkok for a night, but for us it was the easiest way to get to Cambodia especially as we needed to get our last round of vaccination shots- thankfully without the fainting drama this time!
A 5.55am hot, stuffy, packed train brought us to the border, and we enter intoCambodia!
We were very happy to walk across the tarmac landing strip on arrival in Vang Vieng, alas our 6.5 hour journey was via bus not plane, depositing us on an old American build air strip. It would have been a beautiful scenic trip (albeit slightly nauseous thanks to the road winding up, in and around the mountains), only for the smoke. Unfortunately our timing wasn’t great as we arrived in Laos just as they were conducting their yearly controlled tree burning in the mountains. It wasn’t so nice seeing a veil of smoke and flames hovering over the mountainside as we drove through. This was the main reason we decided to head south, as trekking in the northern region would have been unpleasant under such conditions.
We quickly found very nice accommodation, one of the nicest rooms on the trip to date for a brilliant $6 a night with en-suite and hot water! We were just as quick to discover an excellent massage place across the road to stretch us out after the cramped bus- $5 for an hours full body massage … bliss.
Where Luang Prabang was chic, Vang Vieng was more …cheap. Instead of French tour groups; it was lager louts on tour. On our first evening we were treated to a rendition of The Wild Rover belted out from the overflowing jeep of semi-naked drunken bodies. The high spirits weren’t due to the fact that it was St. Patrick’s Day eve, but this seems to be the norm around 7/8pm every evening. Vang Vieng is the place to go in Laos for Tubing and a regular stop on the backpacker route. We saw many of the people from the boat wandering around the town. You get a tuk-tuk to a tubing station on the river (or book a tour that includes tubing, drinking, lunch and a stop at a waterfall), receive a tube, jump in the river and tube down for 90-120 mins. It seems that many bars are set up en route to feed the tubers with alcohol and ‘happy shakes’. The ‘Happy Shakes’ are of the dodgiest kind, along with Happy Pizzas or pancakes or whatever. So the wild rovers in question were returning from one such tour and it seems many a happy shake and drink was had. Laos is a conservative country and all over we see posters with recommended etiquette for the tourists, the top request being to dress modestly and save the swim wear for the beach- yet here we were in the middle of a town at 8pm in the evening and there were drunk girls in skimpy bikinis getting piggy backs from drunken guys, next to their puking mate, turned ash white- looking truly ‘unhappy’…. Am some cultural sensitivity people!
The next day we were chatting to some of the locals to see what they thought about the tourists, mainly we heard that business was down this year, so any visitors were welcome, but we heard a different story from one shop keeper. On our surprised as seeing a home made poster in her store of a cartoon strip with a foreigner shoplifting, followed by him being arrested and pleading for leniency, she told us this story: She had moved to Vang Vieng a few months ago to open a clothes and nic-nack shop and each day something is stolen from the store, maybe a pair of flip flops from the front display or a T-shirt. They are stealing stuff worth a few dollars each, but the cost to her is a lot more as she can’t afford to replace the missing stock and I don’t think they go in for insurance much in that region. We felt guilty just hearing the story, apologising for the guilty parties and assured her we weren’t all like that.
After leaving the store and before renting bicycles for touring around the area we came across two almost passed out foreigners just down the road from the Irish bar. It was St.Patrick’s Day, and these two must have had a whole happy meal because they couldn’t pick themselves up from the pavement. All the locals had stopped in their tracks and were just staring, as were we. We looped back around after collecting our bikes a few minutes later to offer them some help in getting to their hotel room, as it’s been know for the police to arrest and charge anybody taking drugs and these were prime examples, but they thankfully were gone- hopefully not with the police. That drama over we high tailed it out of town for a lovely cycle around the area.
It really is a beautiful country full of caves, waterfalls, lagoons, mountains, rivers and we’re glad we got to share some of it.
Bizarrely most of the restaurants and bars in the town show ‘Friends’ all day and night until curfew, where the restaurants seem to close at 10.30 and bars at 11.30pm; so we chose our dinner according to which episodeof Friends we wanted to re-watch!
Luang Prabang agreed with us the minute we stepped of the boat; a lovely European-esque riverside town with a hot south-east Asian climate. We were flagged down by a boy on his bike asking us to check out his hotel, as you know we usually avoid touts like the plague, but this kid was cute and we needed somewhere to stay. We were expecting to deal with his parents on arriving at the guesthouse, but the boy showed us around and when we tried bargaining for the room cuteness was no pushover, he knew it’s value in that town. When it looked like we weren’t going to take it he was out the door and back on his bike to catch a few more strays from the boat! We were eventually won over by the free tea, coffee and bananas on offer and took it at $7 a night- a tiny box room with shared bathroom, but the alternatives are seriously high end.
Luang Prabang we discovered has a wealth of beautiful boutique hotels. The buildings and décor are amazing; such a beautiful town. For future enquiry we checked out a few of the nice hotels and they range from around $60 to $200 a night and are fabulous.
Although, fab hotels aside, there really isn’t much to do in the town apart from frequent the wealth of delicious restaurants and café’s to watch the world go by. “A break from the travelling” was a phrase we overheard from more then one table. But it definitely isn’t just a backpacker retreat (hence the fancy hotels), as Laos was formally under French control there were a lot of French tour groups wandering around the temples, museums and night market. At the food market we discovered an ‘all you can pile on your place’ vegetarian buffet for a whopping 5,000 kip (70c). I definitely got my money's worth! But our favourite food was the baguette sandwiches, a legacy from the French that the Laos have taken to heart, usually eaten at breakfast, we followed suit and had a hardy start to each day. It felt like being back in college after a night out ordering a fresh roll filled with salad, egg, tofu, tomatoes chilli sauce, chicken for Mal…yummy. My expanding stomach dost protest. Again, like Chiang Mai, the tourist part of town is almost solely for the tourists and a walk across the river showed us the stark contrast between the rich and the poor, a contrast clearly visible in the many local towns we passed on our 6.5 hour bus journey to Vang Vieng six days later. (Six days? We really have no idea where the time went or what we did!).
Getting to Laos: We left our large love nest in Chiang Mai via a luxury VIP bus to Chiang Rai (including cookies, water, wet wipes, tv, toilet, a/c!)- 3hours, transferred onto a local bus to the border town of Chiang Khong – 3 more hours, next a short tuk-tuk ride to the border which happens to be the Mekong river, received our exit stamps, got ferried across the river and finally entered Laos.
We paid our visa fee ($35+$1), plus a weird over time charge and found a room in the town- Huay Xai. Laos is definitely more expensive than Thiland (but Thailand is cheap), they generally import everything and slap on a nice charge for foreign products- which is basically everything! The room was decent, the town was drab. We found the ferry point for the morning, scouted the ticket prices ($23 each from the office on the dock- not a travel agent) and called it a night.
Our next two days in Laos were spent boating down the mighty MekongRiver; pretty uneventful stuff. We arrived just after nine to get a ticket; we were told it left at 10.30am and get there early to have a decent seat. There were no decent seats, just wooden benches, but we managed to nab two plastic garden furniture ones down the back. We didn’t leave until 12.30pm. The scenery was beautiful, lots of post card scenes. Inside the boat/barge were lots of Australians getting drunk on the very fine Lao beer, chatting up all the girls. Two days on a boat with nothing better to do I guess- I got through a book. Due to the lack of lights on the boats the journey has to take two days so at 6.30 we pulled into a town called Pakbeng and we were released for the night. Thankfully accommodation wasn’t a problem the town appears to run solely on tourism. It’s strange really; this tiny riverside town is full of western looking guesthouses and restaurants with English menus and multi-linguistic staff! We had a nice dinner and sampled the local brew. From a non beer drinker, I have to say it’s quite good; from a beer connoisseur, Mal says it’s excellent!
9.30 the next morning had us back on the boat, unfortunately for us everybody had the bright idea of being early, the boat was changed to a smaller one and there were soft cushioned seats but none left for us! We had to camp on the floor at the back with the luggage; which really wasn’t as bad as it sounds as we got to stretch out and have a little nap. But by 6pm on arriving in Luang Prabang we were more than ready to exit- actually being the first as we were so near our luggage!
You can get a speed boat (yes an actual small speed boat), where you have to wear a helmet because of the very frequent crashes due to the dangerous break neck speed they travel at. If this doesn’t sound like your thing, they have recently improved the roads so it’s possible to take a bus to complete the journey in a day probably in more comfort, or you can fly direct… but it’s the experience that matters!
We took a leisurely overnight train to Chiang Mai, expecting leafy mountain coolness, we were met by another large, hot, steaming concrete city albeit with a tourist heart. Thankfully the quaint old town is where the tourist accommodation and café’s are and it’s lovely. It’s surrounded by a moat and remnants of the 700 year old wall that was built to protect the city. The area is shut to traffic every Sundayfor a huge outdoor market and down the road near all the fancy 5 star hotels is a massive night market.
On that note, our room actually resembled a nice hotel suite, for $10 a night (bargained down from $15) we had a massive room with leather sofa, cable TV, fridge, double bed, single bed, en suite with hot shower and free wi fi internet in our room!! Funky Monkey Guesthouse everyone run by the lovely English/Thai couple David and Nuy.
While in Chiang Mai, between wandering the markets, hundreds of temples and sampling the fruit shakes we went to a Muay Thai (Thai Boxing) match. Initially I wasn’t too keen on going as I can’t even stand seeing boxing on the TV it’s just so brutish to me, but this sport is definitely about skill and finesse. I was able to relate to the matches we saw from our previous Tai Kwan do training in Korea, especially since the first few fights were between young lads- similar to the shows our students put on in Korea- except they never knocked each other out! These kids really went for it, they held nothing back. We watched seven matches, two of which were kids, then teenagers, then older fighters- three matches ended in Knockouts!
There was one foreign fighter from Scotland, the highlight of the night- all the tourists were interested in watching, but the Thai he was fighting looked out of shape and the Scot knocked him out within a few minutes; a disappointing fight to watch. The rest of our time we spent looking at the millions of Wats (Thai temples) and wandering the back streets. Oh and having amazing one hour massages for an incredible $3 an hour!!
Chiang Mai is a great place to visit the Hill Tribes of the north, the long neck tribe being the most famous, where the inhabitants carry out the horrible (outlawed in many countries) practice of elongating the women’s necks with rings of metal (which actually just pushes down their collar bone). This practice is spurred on by tourism, thus we didn’t visit. We also didn’t go trekking, another accessible activity from Chiang Mai as we were finding it difficult just walking around the temples in the oppressive humid heat. I think it’d be better to visit Chiang Mai in the cool season! Despite this we really loved it and will definitely visit again- Mal is already thirsting for a strawberry yogurt ice shake which he had there everyday.
