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Luang Prabang

So it was a very long and hot bus ride through some spectacular jungle covered mountains. A.C. buses out here do have A.C., but they aren't that effective when the tempertures are in the high 30s and theres a bus full of hot Travellers. Temperature hot, that is. When we got to Luang Prabang there we a few touts but not many.

The town is on the UNESCO list as a world heritage town and is suppossed to have old French architectural buildings. I was struggling to see the French-ness in them, but i'm sure they know what they are talking about. The town is going through a restoration faze at the moment and having its pavements re-paved. There are loads of good resturants serving all the usuall fare but the main attraction of the town seems to be the night market that happens every night, selling local crafts from all around in the local villages. Things on sale were carved wooden elephants, clothes, scarfs paintings, music and jewllery. Luang Prabang is the biggest and only place in Laos where there is a good selection of crafts.

I checked to see if any body else had joined my trip, but I was still the only one. I decided to change to another trip on a flatter river but with more poeple on the trip to make it slightly cheaper. 2 girls that had just been working in India, before heading to Uni, Elly and Jess were all ready on the 2day trip as well as some locals from Vientiane and an Irish and American couple on the first day of our trip, who had just been teaching in Taiwan for 2 years. Still no rivers paddled in Laos, a month to early. There does seem to be some good rivers here, but only in the middle of the monsoon, August time. The river trip was the Nam Ou, grade 2, at a push. We stayed in a village for the night, no A.C. and no fan so it was a very hot and humid nights sleep, topped off with next door starting there rice thrashing machine at 5am. The next day was the same floating down the river. It was 41 degs. We got back to town and headed out for a meal before going around the night market for a final shop before hitting the hostel for a good nights sleep.

I hadn't enough time to go any where else in Laos and to much to head straight back for Thailand so I decided to head for the Slow Boat trip up the Mekong River to Pak Beng and then on to Heuy Sai on the Thai boarder. It was to be 2 days on the boat, 9hrs each day. The LP (bible) said that the wooden seats weren't very amuzing after a few hours but it was a nice suprise to see reclining seats  that looked like they had come straight out of a bus. The engine was new and fairly quiet, so we started our trip up North. I got talking to my neighbour on the boat who was working for the Toursim Agency, Jo from San Diego, in Luang Prabang and after 9hrs chatting the trip was almost over. We ended up in the middle of the jungle where a small town had evolved just on river traffic and tourists, there were 5star hotels and great resturants, including Indian. Its ashame the electric wasn't 24hrs as it got very hot and stuffy during the middle of the night. The next boat to take us to the boarder, wasn't as good. The dreaded wooden seats that were just about wide enough if you doubeled them up, and a very old engine that made alot of noise.

The hydraulics of the Mekong are amazing. Huge amounts of water being forced down a smal, ish river with lots of rocks at the bottom, causing back eddies, whirl pools and the boat to roack violently most of the way up the river. At some points the boat was barley moving upstream as because of the flow going down. The scenery was spectactular, jungle with the odd village every half hour, with no power or roads to them, there only means of transport the mighty Mekong.

As with all things out here the boat arrived after the boarder crossing, so we had to spend the night in Laos before crossing the next morning to the other side.

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