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!

The holiday in our travel :-)

When we were dreaming and planning about this trip Rino always said that we shouldn’t set any alarms, since this would be his holiday and he wanted to get out of the rhythm he had on Bali. But ever since we left we have been setting alarms every day and even really early once, like the day we left Penang for Koh Phi Phi. At 5am our 10-person minivan would pick us up at our hostel. We were again flabbergasted about the luxurious outlook of our van, this time it looked like a PIMP’d minivan with TV screen and huge amount of speakers. But it was still 5am so no movies yet, only trying to sleep some more. It felt like no time had passed when we arrived at the Malaysian/Thai boarder, for both of us it was the first time crossing a boarder like this and luckily everything went smoothly. Unfortunately though we had to switch minivans soon after the boarder and of course the next one wasn’t that fancy anymore and they don’t really consider tall people like Rino in these countries.

A one and a half hour boat ride took us to Koh Phi Phi and we arrived late afternoon. Just before sunset, and we could still enjoy the beauty of the island with the astonishing limestone cliffs, white beaches and green and turquoise clear water. Rino had been looking on TripAdvisor again for a nice accommodation and after 3 nights in dormitories we wanted a room for ourselves again. PP Insula was supposed to offer good value and it certainly was, for around €20 we had a ‘real’ hotel room with great view and away from all the party but still very central and most of all it had a normal blanket again! A blanket we had been looking forward to for 11 months now. In the evening we had some dinner with Ege, a Turkish guy we met on the way over. After dinner we headed up to the party area and soon were confronted with Koh Phi Phi drinking scene. Small buckets with 375ml bottles of local spirit mixed with cola and red bull for €3-6, sold just on the street, a bit crazy party scene. We continued to the beach were several party places were preparing their guests for the evening with stunning fire shows (see pics in slideshow).

We planned 4 nights with 3 full days on Koh Phi Phi and the first we used to finally sleep out, relax for a day and enjoy this paradise island. The second day we had planned 2 snorkelling trips. The first one being a shark watch early in the morning (again this insane early alarm, damn it), apparently we are wrongly educated about sharks. Most sharks are afraid of humans and therefore would not harm them, Iris needed a bit more convincing about this theory, but eventually she agreed to join. Seeing sharks was guaranteed, or else you get the money back. Unfortunately for us the visibility was very low and it was windy and wavy and our good and friendly guide decided to end the trip after snorkelling for 20 minutes, because this would not give us value for money. Luckily we still had a second snorkelling trip planed for later that day, on that trip we finally found Nemo and a lot of other cool underwater life :-). We went to several snorkelling spots around Koh Phi Phi Leh (famous from the movie ‘The Beach’ with Leonardo DiCaprio that was shot there). Although conditions were again not perfect and we couldn’t go to the famous beach we had a lot of fun with our fellow travellers in the group and our sweet and nice guide. In the evening we went out partying with Ezz (who we met again on Phi Phi), Ege and some other people we met this evening. We had a great time!!!

The next day was a hangover day, especially for Rino. They shouldn’t sell these buckets; you get too drunk in very short time, luckily it hardly costs any money and we had a great time ;-). We arranged the boat out of Phi Phi for the next morning to bring us to Phuket, from were we took a flight to Udon Thani a city close to the Laos boarder. The flight went very smoothly and also the boarder crossing was very easy. Around 8pm we arrived in Vientiane and after a small search we found a hostel, but more on fantastic Laos later.

For now if you are dying to speak to us we have bought ourselves a Lao number so you can reach us on +856 2058 892 883 (until the 24th of July).

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.