Having decided to forego any long journeys on any type of land transport we limited ourselves somewhat (by our choice of flights) to Luang Prabang and Pakse and the surrounding areas.
I have already covered some of our time in Luang Prabang in another story but that was so long ago that i will probably end up repeating some stuff here but, at least i am finally filling in this bit of the story.
After the inital suprise by the show of wealth in some areas especially in the types of shops and restuarants not to mention the presence of a brand new shiny hummer jeep! It is obvious that the town (or city as it is known) is very reliant on the tourist dollar. A lot of the tourists were of a more mature age and part of adventure/cultural tour experiences but maybe those with a little extra luxury. There is definately a market for the higher cost local crafts in some of the beautiful shops which i contented myself with just browsing. It is definately a town to do some shopping if you have the inclination, money and space. Every night there was a market taking up a large portion of the main street in front of the palace. The market mainly consisted of fabric handicrafts made by the locals at home including slippers, bags and clothes as well as jewellery, antiques and some food stalls too.
We found that there were also a lot of more budget travellers as we expected unfortunately though we found that our money did not go as far here as we expected- i suppose that is what happens when the upper end of the tourist market overlaps with the budget one. Even so it was nice that we could all be millionaires, that opportunity does not come along too often.
We had a pretty quiet time in Luang prabang cycling around along the river watching people working on the areas of land farmed mainly for subsistance on both sides of the river, visited some of the beautiful Wat's some of which were being repaired by monks. We also visited the royal palace, a fairly simple building in the great scheme of palaces; the palace interior has been left more or less intact to how it was when it was occupied. One of my favourite parts was the room decorated in colourful glass mosaics (possibly the throne room) depicting many different scenes from battles, decapitations, strange fish and many others the rest of the palace past this point is pretty spartan.
We ventured down to the river and as well as watching the locals playing boules we could see the slow boats meandering along, it was especially relaxing at sunset which was beautiful over the water. During the day people also use the river for the less conventional transport option of tubing. This involves sitting in a big tractor inner tube and floating down the river, it often appeared as if they were having a competition to see how many people they could fit in one without turning it over which did happen fairly often.
One of the more interesting places that we ate was the 'lao' BBQ, a cook your own affair which we have since seen called by various other things. We had buffalo and chicken and a lot of greens, noodles and egg for the soup which was also part of it. It was certainly a lot of fun to do, i wish we could do it at home. This BBQ place was one of the more popular places to sit and have a drink, something to eat and to stay out a little later. There were definately a higher number of younger people than in some other places and you could sit in the garden or inside to play pool or watch TV. They played Lao music which we did not see as unusual but a sign outside seemed to indicate it was. The sign stated that as of a certain date the government had declared that only lao music could be played. It also stated that a 11pm curfew was in place. We did not really know what to make of this especially as many other places seemed to be breaking it!
We also got our first taste of the lao love of drinking on womans day. A day when women are supposed to get the day off and the men do the work, or at least that is what we were told. Definately something that we should adopt in the UK! It did appear however that most people of both sexes took the day off and had a few drinks to celebrate.
We took a day trip to the waterfalls nearby (via a local village). The busy minibus drove us through the countryside along dusty roads and past a shocking amount of burning or recently burned vegetation (a scene we were, sadly, to see repeatedly in other places we saw) as well as some local villages which reconfirmed to us that in no way was the rest of lao like luang prabang. One thing that we saw that was a unexpected was some white water buffallo. On arrival at the falls with what seemed like half the tourists in luang prabang we wandered to the water stopping off to see a bear sanctuary and a lone tiger, both of which were once common in the wild here. Sam was braver than me and braved the freezing water as did our guide/friend Sak, who came on the trip with us. Both seemed to enjoy leaping off the rope swing and jumping of the waterfalls.
We got bikes again but this time we had a purpose. Sak had told us about a local sports event. He said there would be football and that it was a tournament between various schools across the country, we had the impression that it was only a minor thing as we had heard nothing else about it. It was actually quite far out of town (in the end i did not go as i was not feeling too well). It was also in reality a very big thing in Laos as i saw on the TV later. The event Sam went to was only the opening ceremony there were no actual games. There was however some parachutists, helicopters, marching parades and some singing and dancing as well as thousands and thousands of people for who an event like this was something that they didn't see very often. It was certainly something to give Sam (wish i was there!) a lasting impression on one of our last days in luang prabang before heading south.
