Ocean and I arrived in Luang Prabang a couple of hours later than expected due to a landslide – by this time i am totally bored with landslides and not phased by them at all – i just got on with catching up on my blog while waiting for them to clear the road. We got a tuktuk into town and then went guest house hunting. I made one request – it must have free wifi! So the first guest house we found had wifi and it was a reasonable price for a lovely room – we had decided to share to reduce costs – so we took it without further ado. We headed straight for the night market, which has a section for selling local and Thai wares as well as a few food sections. The one cooked food section is a little alleyway which gets transformed at dusk to become adjoining eateries – restaurants is just not the right word for them. The sell chicken and fish on a stick and an ‘all-you-can-fit-on-your-plate’ option for less than £1. They had a few vegetarian stalls which had options of rice, noodles and many plates of veggies – including pumpkin!! Oh how i have missed pumpkin! So pile it on i did – after all, i hadn’t eaten since breakfast! After that we walked around the night market, which just has such an amazing ambiance, and then a fruitshake – fresh fruit liquidised with ice (and coconut milk if you wanted). Being sufficiently full i headed back to the guest house to make use of the wifi... ;-)
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| the night market street by day... |
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| The night market at night... |
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| dinner!!! |
The next morning, we just wandered around a bit and then spent quite a few hours in the museum in the afternoon. The Palace Museum in Luang Prabang used to be the palace of the Laos royal family – they were forced out of power about 30-odd years ago, and were never seen thereafter – so no one quite knows what happened to them. The palace is quite modest inside, only the front room is a bit gaudy. On display are the royal cars, their bedrooms, books, clothes and gifts from foreign countries – the one gift from the US was a piece of moon rock from when a spaceship visited the moon – quite a cool gift!
We then headed back to the night market for dinner – same again James! As we were leaving we managed to make it onto Japanese television... LOL! Eating dinner in the night market were Japans top comedians in bright green jackets and grass hats and funny glasses, so Ocean being the friendly person she is decided to start up a conversation with the non-English-speaking Japanese (luckily they had an interpreter).
Our second full day in Luang Prabang, started off hunting for a reasonably priced rental bicycle – we were heading out of town. We had been told that the road to the That Sae waterfall was good for cycling, so once we found some lovely pink bikes we were off! What people don’t notice when in a car is the slight incline in a road – it is definitely noticeable on a bicycle!!! After a few ups, we came to a big down – which was great – but what went through my head was ‘no way am i cycling up this hill on the way home!!’ We both agreed that hitching was the way forward!
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After our sometimes tiring 17km bike ride, we arrived at the village of Ban Aen – someone being creative had set up a car park – where you pay to park your bikes and scooters. We were not falling for that one, and headed on straight to the ferry. As we disembarked on the other side we could hear the waterfall, but before that we found the elephants! There is the opportunity to feed them either bananas or sugarcane, so we bought a bunch of sugarcane. They untied the one ellie and he legged it straight towards us and the sugar cane bundle – no one has taught him manners, as he just grabbed it and stuffed it in his mouth before i could really make sense of what was happening. That over with, we walked a few more meters to the falls. That was us for the day – we stayed at the waters edge and wadded with the elephants when they were allowed to come in for a dip, and when we were sitting on the side they would come there too, so we had the opportunity to stroke them. I had a bit of a tussle with one ellie as he grabbed an abandoned waterbottle and decided to drink it – bottle and all! I tried reasoning with it and tried to take it away, but i don’t think she spoke English, and i wasn’t too sure how she would respond if i was overly assertive. Unfortunately i failed in my attempts and the ellie ate the plastic bottle. This was quite upsetting for me and i put my forehead to hers in distress. I suspect it is not the first time she has done that, and there are no signs saying keep your belongings well away from the edge of the water. Water bottle incident aside, it was a truly magical day – where else can one have such an experience with these amazing creatures.
At the end of the afternoon, the elephants were made to perform tricks, like playing basketball, football and other acrobatic stunts with their mohuts (handlers).
The journey home involved a ferry back across the river and then a shortish ride to the main road, where we decided to wait for a lift. We probably waited about 20mins before a female truck driver with long electric blue fingernails stopped to give us a lift. The back of her truck was empty, so plenty of room for the bikes, and we headed back to town.
And yes, back to the night market for dinner!! LOL!
Our last day in Luang Prabang was spent catching up with a family we had met in Vang Vieng and catching ferry across to the other side of the Mekong to explore the local villages and temples. It was very hot and we really had no clue what we were going to do on this side, so after a while we ended up taking a tuktuk to a local village where the driver proceeded to show us around before returning us to the ferry area. I felt a bit weird walking through the village – it kind of makes people into spectacles, which is not how i like to explore places. Then it was back to the other side to catch the local bus back to Vientiane.
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