Tomorrow we start our slow trip to Thailand, if the rains don't make the river impassable so it seems like an appropriate time to do a little update for our time in Laos! Unfortunately, due to where the weekends happened to fall, we have not been able to spend quite as long here as we initially would have liked, but I guess that just means it will have to move over onto the 'to be revisited' list!
Having eventually arrived at the peaceful island of Don Deth we were faced with a tough decision, stay only 3 nights and get to Vientiane on the Thursday with enough time to sort Thai Visa's before the weekend, or stay for 7 nights and get to Vientiane after the weekend.... With the prospect of potential climbing in Vang Vieng we were forced to choose the former option! We left early Wednesday morning on a short boat trip back to the mainland, where we boarded a rather full minibus to the nearest transport hub, Pakse 2 and a half hours North, where we spent 8 hours waiting for our night-sleeper bus! Fun!! The nightbus was fairly standard, 5 in a bed, heads being heated by the engine whilst bodies were frozen by the aircon, arriving 2 hrs late, the usual. At which time we piled into a tuktuk to take us the last 9km into the centre. After a rapid check-in we were back in a tuktuk heading to the Thai consulate with a midday Visa deadline, nearly two hours later we emerged successful (in that we had got the applications in on time, not that they had been approved yet! We had to wait til tomorrow for that!) though 2000 baht worse off and a little bit hungry having not eaten for about 20 hours at this point!
After 'breakfast' we explored the town, on foot, a poor decision as it was by this point pretty sweltering! However we did get to climb the Laos equivalent to the Arc de Triumphe, and visit the local bus station where after a fruitless 20 minutes we left thoroughly confused. The local bus was, according to the lady in the planning office as the bus station doesn't seem to do information, going to cost us more than the tourist buses (a fellow traveller later proved this to be right!) So tourist bus for us! Having picked up our Thai visas we prepared to head to Vang Vieng.... A notorious tourist town on the South East Asia route....
As we pulled across the disused airstrip into Vang Vieng we couldn't help but notice how beautifully sited it was, a pang of jealousy for the first travellers who came across this spot! The weather was hot, the guys in the climbing shops seemed confident that stuff was climbable, so we bought ourselves a guidebook and pondered over where to head out to the next day (an easy decision as only one of the crags was close enough to get to easily and had stuff that we had any hope of climbing having not done so in over 6 months not including the couple of days in Yangshuo) whilst in the background blared the subtle mix of the Friends soundtrack and the drunken cries of tourists being poured out of the back of tuktuks after a hard day of tubing.
The next morning we set off on our bicycles in search of our chosen crag! A few kilometres out of town we pulled off the main drag and headed down a dirt track before parking up at what we hoped was the correct spot. However the expected bridge across the river alluded us so after a short search we resorted to asking for help! An interesting game of charades later we were wading out to a bamboo raft that had been swum across the river by a man in his pants. On the other side, and after another game of charades where we hoped that we indicated we would be back in about 5 hours, we hoicked up our bags and headed off into the rice fields. The access description was to this point fairing us reasonably well, follow the rice field to the right, cross to the other side and continue to follow to the right, easy, through the stand of trees past the banana plantation and you're there. Right... So the stand of trees in front of us was behind a fence with the universal sign for keep out all over it (otherwise known as barbed wire). Helpfully a local family were lounging nearby so after some more mime action we followed a path to our right, for all of 20m before it turned into a mudbath. Ah well, we had come this far, so off came our shoes and we waded into the ankle deep mud. 50m further on we realised that we could have looped round this part, oops, Ah well a quick wash in a stream and onto the next barrier. Two gates with a very vocal dog at the far end. Cautiously we plowed on and as we approached the second gate we realised the dog was accompanied by a family that waved us past whilst shouting at the dog and indicating to us to be careful as the dog might bite! Fun! A final gate, a herd of cows and we approached what could only be described as a crag, bolts and all! Woop!! A short inspection later left us with the conclusion that climbing there would be something akin to scaling a waterfall, not so woop! So back we went cows, dogs, gates (round the mud this time), rice and river. The final blow for the day, the memory card had erased all the photos we had taken of the whole adventure.
This adventurous but ultimately disappointing day lead us to cut our trip in Vang Vieng short, and so after one more day (spent relaxing in the pools near some local caves) we headed North to Luang Prabang. There is not much to say about our stay here, despite it being a beautiful town. The highlight however was, believe it or not, rising before dawn to see the monks spill forth from the dozens of Wats to collect alms from the local citizens, and a few tourists (whilst many more did their best to try the patience of a monk by sticking an slr in their face and trying to blind them with the flash).
(To avoid any confusion, we have now been in Thailand for several weeks but increasingly poor and/or expensive internet has prevented me from finishing this entry until now, apologies!)
