Luang Prabang & Mekong River (24/4/12 - 29/4/12)

It's only really been in the last 20 years that Laos has been on the tourist map. This means that much of the country has not yet been developed for tourists and it feels like you're really travelling into the unknown. The major disadvantage though is that the infrastructure isn't really in place. The roads being a good example. They're so bumpy it's unbelievable. The 7 hour bus ride from Vang Vieng up to Luang Prabang was even bumpier than when we did the 4x4 jeep trip on Fraser Island, Australia. The bus shook so hard that bags constantly fell from above our heads and it felt as though we were in the middle of an earthquake!

Luang Prabang was definitely smaller than we had imagined and for some reason it took us ages to get our bearings. I think it was the third day by the time we'd located the main high street! The layout of the town just didn't make sense and the map in our guide book wasn't really much help. Our hotel was fine and we managed to get the young night porter to come to our room and show us which channel we could watch the Barcelona - Chelsea Champions League semi final on. Kick off was 2.30am our time but we stayed up for it anyway!

The only trip we did in Luang Prabang was a half day visit to a local waterfall. It was worth the journey, but the water was ice cold and therefore very few people were swimming! Even better than the waterfall though, was a bear park located in front of the waterfall. About a dozen brown bears lived in a large, open-air enclosure and they were incredible to watch. It was a bit random to see bears there, but they looked to be fairly well looked after. They kept wrestling with each other and their strength was scary.

On our waterfall trip, another couple said that they had woken up at 5.30am that morning to feed some monks. We didn't quite understand what they meant, until they showed us a video. Basically a load of monks walk from their residence to a temple at 6am each morning and tourists line the streets to present them with food for the day. Jenna insisted that we do it the following day, although I was quite happy to have a lie-in! So we got up at silly o'clock and headed for where we thought the monks were going to walk. We arrived there at 5.45am and bought some rice and bananas from women who line the streets. Gradually the monks walked past us in single file and the tourists sit on the pavement and place the food in each monk's individual food basket. I left Jenna to this and stood on the other side of the road to get some photos and to film it. I couldn't help but laugh to myself watching Jenna though. Most people would give each monk a banana or a small handfull of rice. Not Jenna though - she was too generous for her own good! She was dishing food out as if there was no tomorrow! 3 bananas here, 2 handfulls of rice there. She'd run out of food by about the twentieth monk and there were still another hundred or so to go!

After going back to bed for a couple of hours, we spent the rest of the day walking around some temples in more 40 degree heat. I don't know how many more temples we have left in us! When it had cooled down a bit, we walked up the highest point in the town to get a view of the sunset.

Although there was a lot more of Laos to see, few backpackers make it any further than Luang Prabang. Therefore our next stop was North Thailand. If you have time on your side, the best way to get from Laos to Thailand is by a 2 day slow boat along the Mekong River. It was a really beautiful journey as we floated slowly along the river at maybe 20 mph. We were on the boat for about 9 hours on each of the days, but it was comfortable enough. The path of the river took us past some really rural areas which are inaccessible by car, which meant we got to see how the Lao people live their lives on the river.