Luang Prabang

The view from top of the hill looking over Luang Prabang

As some of you may have figured we are doing the Vientiene to Hua Xia trek, Luang Prabang is the very old capital of Laos. We got here by a long but scenic bus journey through some mountains, which took about 6/7 hours. The bus was sold to everyone on board as a VIP bus, but that asks the question what defines a VIP bus?? In this case its the lack of Air conditioning, broken seats, crazy driving, lack of storage and overall a pretty shoddy bus which required a water top at every stop! But still it got us there, just!

On arrival we set about looking for a decent guest house, we were met by guest house touts at the bus station so a few of us went with one of them to check out the rooms. The rooms were nice, but a little noisy and a bit far from the center of town, which consisted of one road!

Luang Prabang is a peninsular set in between the joining Nam Khan and Mekong rivers. this makes it potentially one if the most beautiful place to visit. We went for a few walks on the river front which was really nice, but coming from Vang Vieng where the we spent so much time on the river, here it didnt seem all that.

These looked like poppadoms drying in the heat, i think they might have been.

On one of the days when we were feeling a bit better we scaled a large hill that over looked the city to catch the sunset. this was far from the beutiful serene sunset we had expected, as you can see in the picture below there were hundreds of other tourists who had the same idea as us. But the other side was a lot nicer. On the way down preet was swarmed by a gruop of kids selling things, each one claiming that she had prmised to buy something off them, they were quite funny so we did buy a few dollies.

a Stunning sunset over Luang Prabang

what we really saw, never mind the tourists eh?

Preet doing the deal, or getting ripped off, who knows.. who knows!

Tummy bug!

Yup, i felt as bad as I looked, but the Papaya smoothie really helped!

Our plan was to spend one or two nights here, but had to stay a few more as me and Preet got a tummy bug on the second night so had to spend a few days recovering. The worst thing was that we had checked into a teak wood guest house, which looks nice but you could hear your neighbours through the wooden walls, which meant they could here us with our tummy problems! But we recovered and were soon in action again.

Tad Sae waterfall and Elephants,

The waterfalls, the water was soooooo cold though.

Yipee i feel better! Good enough to be on the fried rice and sprite!

We decided that we were feeling good enough to head out on tuk tuk to go see the small waterfall, which wasnt too far out of town. So getting down to the river bank we chartered a small boat to the waterfall and elephant sanctury.

The elephants needed no encouragemwnt to pose, naturals!

the waterfall was great with large pools which cascaded into one another, the water was a cool blue, almost good enough to drink, except that the elephants bathed in it and you would probably be really ill if you drank it, not something we would risk in our condition at the time!