Luang Prabang and our way to Bangkok

Luang Prabang is a beautiful small city in the north of Laos and the old main capital until the 1500 century. Since 1995 it is UNESCO world heritage and it’s becoming more and more touristic, yet it is a very relaxing and lazy city with a lot of good atmosphere. The authentic Lao daily life is mixed with the well-known touristic scene. Walking around on the morning market at 6 am, sniffing in the smells and impressions of everything or strolling around the evening market with other tourists mixed with locals, eating delicious Lao food right from the market buffet. Or watching the monks and young novices walk by on the street and watch their alms processions at sunrise. This, together with elephant adventure and 2 day trekking in the area and seeing the ethnic villages, made a week in Luang Prabang unforgettable for us!

The time in Luang Prabang we had outside our adventures went to exploring the city, doing some sightseeing, strolling around the markets, eating good food and drinking many good fruit shakes and Beerlao. It is such a nice city to lose your days and just hang around, joining the relaxed atmosphere.



Luang Prabang is known for its many Wats (Buddhist temples) and monks and novices (the young boys studying in the temples) colouring the city partly orange. At sunrise every morning the monks and novices all over Laos will do their alms procession, collecting food offerings from the people in the streets, giving them their blessings. Iris really wanted to see this happening, so on the last day in Luang Prabang she went out on the streets at 5.30 in the morning to watch the procession. It is known that it is becoming a problem that so many tourists don’t respect the holy act of this procession. They don’t consider the monks’ personal space and privacy by taking pictures very close to them and don’t consider the do’s and don’ts in this matter. You should dress appropriate (cover knees and shoulders), put a scarf over your left shoulder, keep a distance (other side of the street), always be lower than the monk when he passes (sit down), don’t put a camera in their faces and don’t give alms yourself unless you really have a personal reason why this feels important (never do it for the pictures). The whole city has posters about this matter to protect the monks and their procession, but still sadly I was witness to that people are not paying attention and not acting in a respectful way. I wonder if they ever think about that this is the daily life of the monks, they do this every morning and never asked for us, the western tourist who just sees another attraction. I kept my distance on the other side of the street and tried to discreet make pictures of the ritual, which was amazing, its silent and holy and the people kneel down, giving their sticky rice and other food into the monks or novices bowl. Poor kids are begging in line and the monks give some of the food they got to the begging kids. It is a ritual unlike anything I have ever seen and very special to witness. But sadly it was a mixed experience because of all the other tourists photographing close-ups, walking next to the procession, giving alms while talking and not wearing a scarf and so on. If you ever go to Laos, it is well worth getting up at 5 am, but please show respect and let the procession be as much as possible what it is supposed to be.



Slow boat trip
Laos is a very remote country and doesn’t have that much paved roads, therefore many people travel with boats over the Mekong river. We heard good stories about the 2-day slow boat between Huay Xai and Luang Prabang downstream the Mekong river. We wanted to take this boat upstream towards Huay Xai, which is at the Laos boarder to Thailand. Taking the boat upstream makes the trip even slower, but it’s a beautiful ‘ride’ along the river with the Laos nature and tribes. Each day took about 9 hours, the boats are very basic and the seats are not that great, but it’s an authentic way to travel in Laos and to see a big part of the country. Time went by with reading books, looking at nature and the local life along the river, waving to kids and fishermen and eating snacks. ;-) It were two very relaxing days. Overnight we slept in Pakbeng, a tiny village along the river with guesthouses for guests from the slow boats both ways.



When we arrived in Huay Xai, we were just too late for immigration to Thailand, so had to stay the night. We had planned to take a flight to Bangkok, but now we found it easier to take the night bus the next day, cheaper also. The 13-hour trip was going pretty fast and we both slept a few hours. It didn’t matter, because we wanted to enjoy the time still left as much as we could.

Bangkok was a great city to end our trip, we will tell about it in our next post. Now we are packing up to leave for our flight, flying home after 11 months of wonderful Southeast Asia adventures!

Vientiane & Vang Vieng

So we arrived in Laos, the first stop was the main capital Vientiane. In the evening of our arrival we headed out for diner and a beer. Laos is famous for their national beverage ‘Beerlao’, something we immediately had to try out of course. Well, it’s definitely accepted, as is the Lao food.

Vientiane
The next morning we decided to check out the Vientiane cycling tour of the Lonely Planet, first stop was a bakery for breakfast. Laos is a former French colony and therefore there is a lot of French food and influences to be found around the countries cities. After breakfast we rented a bike and biked around the city centre. The route took us along some amazing sights, which are best shown with our pictures. In the afternoon we took a bumpy tuktuk ride to the Buddha Park, 25km outside Vientiane, this is a park with a mix of Hindu and Buddhist statues. This reminds us of Bali, who’s religion is a mix of these two religions.



Vang Vieng
The next morning we headed of with a 5-hour bus ride to Vang Vieng, a city that used to be known for its great scenery with limestone cliffs, caves and climbing. But nowadays its better known for ‘tubing’; sliding down the river in tractor inner tubes with party bars on either side of the river throwing ropes so you are able to get to their bar. The bars and restaurants inside the city are playing reruns of comedy series, especially ‘Friends’, which we loved to see after such a long time. We decided to stay for 3 nights and 2 full days, so we could do one-day nature and adventure and one-day tubing. In our nice and ridiculously cheap (€3,50 per night) guesthouse we booked a trip for the next day. The trip included: mountain biking, several caves, a lunch and a 20km kayak ride and this all for €16 per person :-). We were picked up from our guesthouse and soon sat on our mountain bikes. Our private tour guide brought us to the first cave in a one hour and 15 minutes ride half on paved pad and half on unpaved pads, which was quite challenging at times, since its rainy season. The cave was a water cave, so we had to go in with tubes, which was a very nice and fun experience. The cave looked very unreal and we both had never seen something like this before, we were very impressed. We also crawled and walked around were the water was lower it was a fascinating experience. After a lunch outside the cave we hoped on our mountain bikes again and followed the road to 3 other caves. On the way over to one of the caves Iris fell of her bike into the barbed wires, which was a less pleasant experience.

The bigger caves were used by the people in Laos to hide from the US bombs during the Vietnam War, Laos is the most bombed country in history. The caves are therefore very important for the people in Laos, they brought many Buddha statues into the caves, which is quite impressive. One of the caves was more than 2km long and therefore called the long cave, a tourist who went in the cave once without a guide was lost for 2 days before the locals found him. The smallest cave was called ‘the elephant cave’, because of a small statue of an elephant inside, which is an act of nature according to the people of Laos. The 20km kayak trip was very nice, quiet and beautiful. The quietness was over when we reached the area where the tubing starts, with the loud music and drunken people. After a whole day in the wild we didn’t feel very familiar with these partyscene.



Tubing!
But the next day we still decided to tube, since we wanted to experience that as well and… it was fun, wild and crazy. Rino promised himself no more hangovers so he was happy that we accidently didn’t bring that much money ;-). In our guesthouse we met James and Max, who joined us on the river and along the way we got to meet a lot of other people as well. The bars try to spice thinks up with zip lines, river jumps and even a slide, unfortunately a lot of these fun attractions were closed, since more and more drunk people hurt themselves or even die in the river. Luckily the slide (also called the ‘deathslide’, since a girl died there) was still open and one river jump. Since we were not that drunk it was absolutely harmless and we enjoyed these attractions a lot. All together it was a lot of fun and we enjoyed it more than we had thought we would. But tip nr 1: Don’t get too drunk while tubing!

Planning new adventures!

As we say in Dutch ‘the bullet is through the church’ we have booked our journey out of Bali. Of course we still have three months on Bali left to enjoy paradise, but flight tickets get expensive quickly so we had to make some plans for our trip. Our flight back to Belanda, I mean the Netherlands, is on the 28th of July from Bangkok and Rino’s internship finishes on the 1st of July. We look forward to travel south-east Asia, so we decided to hit the road already a few hours after Rino finishes his last day. We will also celebrate our second anniversary on the 2nd of July and we would like to do something special of course. We now have booked two flights, one from Bali to Kuala Lumpur and one 12 days later from Phuket (Thailand) to Udon Thani (Thailand) near the border of Laos. So we have planned to travel parts of Malaysia, south Thailand, Laos and finishing with Bangkok and its surroundings.

But first we still have lots to look forward to in the coming months with many visits and hopefully loads of trips around the island. At the moment we are in a quieter period with Iris her dengue fever and we are saving money for the visits. So it has been nice for us to talk and plan about our trip in July. Especially Rino is looking forward to that time as he then finally finishes his internship and hopefully graduates. ‘The last mile is the longest’, this definitely counts for his internship.

Iris is making good progress in recovering from dengue fever and is feeling better every day. The energy is slowly coming back and the blood levels are back to normal. She only has to come back to the hospital to check her liver functions. She slowly builds up energy as the virus really cuts into your immune system. We are using more of the mosquito spray nowadays, as we now know what a terrible virus this is.