After spending nearly 2 weeks in Chiang Mai waiting for our Visa’s, we were more than ready to move onto our next country, Laos. We said goodbye to all the new friends we made in Thailand, including the girls and old man who run the guest house, the girls at the coffee shop and laundrette, Junia and Jeed and On, our travel agent who gave us all special prices as we were her first and best customers! Oo-er!
That’s On in the middle by the way!
We spent several hours on a minibus to the border where we met two Irish girls who we eventually travelled through Laos with, Sarah and Rachael! There were 3 Israeli guys on the bus also who were the biggest assholes on earth and they seemed to shadow us on our travels. We didn’t like them and they didn’t like anyone..
At the Thai/Laos border you can see Laos just across the Mekong river. We went across the border with no problems and took a boat to the other side. We met our guide there called Mr information who taught us some Lao phrases which we’ll need - hello, thank you and goodbye! That’s 1 phrase more than we learned in Thailand in a month! Excellent. It is funny that a country so close at the border speaks a totally different language although you can see some similiarities.. Sawahdee Khap for saying hello in Thai, Sahbaidee for hello in Laos..
First thing that strikes you about Laos is the currency. The Laos People’s Democratic Republic is a communist state and is as you’d expect poor and generally f***ed over. The currency is Kip and 1 pound roughly translates to 18,000 kip in demoninations of 1000’s 2000’s, 5000’s, 20000’s and 500000’s so you can imagine everyone’s suprise when they exchanged a couple of quid to find they were millionnaires! I could barely close my wallet and I only exchanged a tenner!
We stayed in the border village of Huay Xia for the night, waiting for the next day when we’d take our slow boat into Luang Prabang
We boarded our slow boat at 9 am the next day and whilst the seating looked uncomfortable like tiny church pews, we thought we’d be able to cope because at least we had a seat each to ourselves.. or so we thought. 20 minutes after we were due to depart another 80 odd travellers piled on and only then did we set off. Albeit in rather cramped seats!
After 9 excruciatingly long hours, we finally arrived at.. Pakbeng, a stopover village for the evening although I think it should be called Rogue town. This town looked so dirty and dodgy with people trying to extort money from the travellers off the boat by taking their bags up the hill from the river and demanding money for it! Luckily it didn’t happen to me as I grabbed my bag from some 9 year old scrote whilst still inside the boat. Cheeky little bugger! There were agents trying to get you to go to their guesthouses and people selling opium and weed. I even heard that the kids were dealers too. The town was run on a massive generator which turned off about 11pm. We stayed in a scummy guest house with rat droppings on the bed.. luxury. Not feeling content with leaving my valuables in the room I decided to take them with me whilst we went out for a meal and some drinks. When we got back we discovered that someone had broken in and stolen Al’s mobile phone, kindly leaving his sim card on the floor along with his camera and ipod! The robber must’ve either been a dumbass or we must have interrupted him and he fled. We’d originally locked the door with a padlock but it turns out that someone had conveniently left a window shutter to the room open. When we opened the shutter we were a bit creeped out to find that there was a derelict room right next door! Anyways, considering all that happened we were knackered and slept soundly. zzzz
The next morning we got onto our slow boat for another 9 hours of fun only to find that this one had luxury seats! Only problem was that we were late and we got the crappy ones again. Oh fucking joy! We arrived 9 hours later in Luang Prabang where the cheapest guesthouse we could find was 100,000 kip a night which is probably the most expensive place we’ve stayed.. and not the best! The country may be poor but it’s expensive. A lot of the goods that come into the country are usually over-inflated in price and little profit is made. We read about how most people in Laos live off $300 a year and live off less than a dollar a day with 8-10 people living in a room. Makes you realise how lucky you really are, eh?
Luang Prabang is a nice place but it stinks of tourism and between you and me dear reader - we haven’t really gone off the beaten track that much during our travels so this place is not really that much different! I suppose Chiang Mai was the least touristy place we’ve been so far and one of my favourites. Luang Prabang is just full of western styled restaurants. There’s even a cinema there where we watched Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, me and Al have talked about this film non stop for nearly 2 and a half years so we were delighted to finally see it again!
We went out on one of the nights and feeling altogether braver after our whiskey experience in Thailand, bought a bottle of export strength vodka. This time we had a bottle to share between 4 people rather than 2 as we met up with some Irish girls who we met back in Thailand on the minibus to Laos! We got a bit pissed and discovered that everywhere closes for the curfew at 11pm. This has something to do with the monks and people who work getting up early every morning at about 6 am where they’d collect alms for the poor. The only place that was left open was a bowling alley in the middle of nowhere! We got a bit freaked out when we got there, expecting a grass lane with a few skittles but it was a 6 lane electronic bowling alley!
The following day we took a cheap tuk tuk to the nearby waterfalls, a real place of beauty and tranquility. We bargained the price down and felt guilty after driving for over an hour to the falls (don’t worry reader, we tipped him afterwards) The waterfalls here were probably the best we’ve seen so far. The water reflected in each of the pools was an azure blue colour but when it washed over the rocks you could see how clean it was. We walked halfway up the falls and took some photos and then we went for the most refreshing swim I’ve ever had. The temperature outside must’ve been about 35!
After swimming and jumping off waterfalls for about an hour we set off back, feeling the cleanest we’d ever been! It soon wore off though after the 1 hour journey back along dusty trails.
The last night we went to watch Father Ted at the cinema place again. There was a wedding next door and the owner of the cinema invited us over. We were only too happy to oblige so we went over and found that this massive excuse for a piss up wasn’t the wedding, it was merely a wedding warmup. The wedding would be tomorrow! Tia, the guy from the cinema explained to us that it was Lao custom to dance if you were invited to so, we went and danced! I thought I’d be able to break out some of my moves but it turns out that they have a traditional dance where you have to kinda flap your hands about in front of you. Oh well.. at least we had beer! One of the guys gave us some Lao whiskey (moonshine) which must’ve helped. I had a cold that day, god knows where it came from in 30 degrees of heat but it made me feel rough enough to have an early night..
