Luang Prabang

After the 'Friends' style culture of Vang Vieng, its been really nice to spend a few days soaking up the delights of Luang Prabang. Luang is the cultural heart of Laos, featuring beautiful French colonial style architecture with Wats (temples) on virtually every street. It sits on the banks of the Mekong as do most of Laos citys and you can while away many an hour with a Beer Lao watching the river goings on. We also got stuck back into some of the gorgeous food they do in this part of the world, but more of that to come on Return of the Monkey.
We spent the first day wandering about the place having a gander at some of the Wats, there are lots of lovely looking ones, feeling a tad "Watted out," though after seeing so many of them round Asia. There were however alot of very intricate mosaics and paintings on the Luang Wats making them stand out more from the crowd.
One of our days was spent visiting another waterfall in the jungle about 30k out of Luang called Tat Kuang Si. We jumped in a Tuc Tuc with an Irish fella and a couple of very posh 18 year old girls, no doubt on a Daddy financed trip around Asia :) On arriving at the waterfall area there is a big fenced in enclosure containing a tiger that had been rescued from poachers when it was a cub, it was munching on a bone when we came across it, amazing to see, so massive and looked really well looked after, very unusual in Laos! The waterfall was all very nice, beautiful turquoise pools of water at the bottom, but after hiking a short way up the side of the fall to an area where you could swim, we came to a pool inundated with the 18-30 crowd splashing about, so we wandered back through the jungle and came across a lovely pool with no-one in sight, bliss!
To be honest, we were very, very lazy in Luang and did very little. You can easily see the whole city in a day just ambling about, which is all you can do in the intense heat of the Laos dry season. Our last day in Luang Prabang was spent doing some house keeping, which we have to do every now and then. Posting stuff back to England, getting our laundry done, buying yet more sunglasses and of course internet action. That evening we went to 'le cinema'. Not really the cinema, but a house where some inventive people had turned the rooms into really comfy video rooms with massive tv's, lots of cusions, 60p Beer Lao and of course, a choice of several hundred films. Following a delicious steak and chips for 2 quid each we relaxed back and watched Jarhead and Brokeback Mountain. Both great films, completely different from each other and I was surprised how brilliant Brokeback was, both highly recommended!
The next leg of travels was to take us to Huay Xai (pronounced Weigh Sigh) which is on the border with Thailand. It took us 2 days on the slow boat down the Mekong to reach Huay Xai and I knew I would write about this in only a few lines, but 2 boat journeys of about 10-11 hours a day with fairly monotonous scenery seemed to take forever! It was only the fact that we had a bunch of really nice people on the boat, a playstation and a walkman that kept us sane. Sam as usual was able to fall asleep at the drop of a hat and actually managed to find the only comfortable place on the boat, a pile of mattresses and secured herself to them, much to the dislike of everyone else on the boat :) The second day she managed to get herself onto some sacks of garlic, again making everyone else jealous :)
We are now in Thailand, at the Bamboo Riverside Guesthouse, eating Mexican? food (lovely) and looking over the Mekong at Laos and continuing to have the best times of our lives! Laos was a truely beautiful country with fantastic people and well up there with Japan in my growing list of favourite countrys we have visited.
Before we post the first Thailand blog however, there is one more blog to come, because we once again ventured into the wilds of Laos for an experience that we'll definately never forget!!!

Laos slideshow