Luang Prabang, Jewel of Asia

Our journey from Vang Vien to Luang Probang was a six hour ride in a cramped minibus with little leg room . It would have been a horrible journey if not for the amazing scenery of Loa mountains dotted with traditional villages.

The whole town of Luang Probang has been listed as a UNESCO world heritage site for its picturesque architecture surrounded by rolling mountains. Upon arrival we took a short tuk-tuk ride to our guesthouse before heading out to a restaurant overlooking the Mekong river with some lovely Thai food. Within an hour or two we knew we wanted to extend our stay in Luang Prabang, so we booked an extra night at our hotel.

That evening we explored the night market for a while and had a tipple in a nearby wine bar and then headed back to the hotel at the 11.30 bar curfew.

The next day we headed into the countryside for a tour of a small village and to spend some time with some elephants! We rode an elephant through the jungle, with him rummaging through the overgrowth for a snack along the way, and then went for a swim in the river while he bathed.

On our final day in Luang Prabang we chartered a tuk-tuk for the day to take us to Quang Si National Park. There's a bear sanctuary in the woods for bears that have been rescued from the black market for wild animals. We've never seen so many bears before! They had plenty of room to roam and had a stimulating environment, so it was a really good cause.

We trekked through the rest of the National Park where there were stunnning waterfalls and natural rock pools with bright blue water where we went for a swim. We stayed there for a few hours and then went for a Chang beer before reconvening with our tuk-tuk driver and heading back to town.

That night, facing another night of an 11.30 bar curfew, we were left with one other option - bowling. It's the only place in Luang Probang where the music and beer keeps flowing until 1am, so we hopped into a tuk-tuk and went for a bare-foot game of bowling or three.

The following day we started our long journey back to Thailand, and in doing so we found the best way to travel in Asia - on a slow boat down the Mekong river. The boat was only half full, so there was plenty of room to sleep, and the views were amazing. After 8 hours we had an overnight stop in a little town called Pak Beng before doing the second 10 hour leg of the journey the following morning, all loking forward to being back on Thai soil again!

                                          

Vang Vien

Even though it was cloudy, Vang Vien was an enchanting place to arrive into, with low mist hanging over the mountains and the Mekong River flowing at their feet.  This town was infamous for the backpacker activity of tubing, which was basically a pub crawl down the Mekong in a rubber ring.  However, last year the police closed down almost all of the riverside bars due to the high death rate of travellers from drunken accidents in the water.

The much safer option of tubing minus the alcohol is still available, and we booked a day trip for our second day in Vang Vien, which included tubing into caves and kayaking along the Mekong.

So, we had another early start to catch a minibus to the site of our cave tubing. When we got off the minibus, we walked through a little village to get to the cave entrance on the water. We were given headlamps and we got into our rubber rings in the freezing water and dragged ourselves into the cave using the rope attached to the cave walls.  We pulled ourselves for 500m through the pitch black waters and then we turned around and pulled ourselves back, which provided quite the arm workout!

The cave that we tubed into

We then sat in the riverside village where we were served barbecued chicken skewers and rice for lunch followed by fresh pineapple.  

Our food being cooked

Lunch!

It was then time to get back on the minibus for a short journey to the place that we'd start our kayaking.  On the way back through the village to the bus, the guide stopped to show us a temple in a cave.  Asians will take any chance to sneak a cheeky temple into a daytrip.

Temple Cave, AKA Elephant Cave

The kayaks were two people to one kayak, so Steven and Marc got in one and Amy and Gareth got in another.  In total, we kayaked for about an hour and a half, which again proved quite tiring on the arms, especially for little Amy, but she refused to stop rowing and let Gareth do all the work!  After 40 minutes of rowing (and Gareth and Amy crashing into some rocks and getting stuck!), we stopped at one of the remaining riverside bars for a rest and a beerlao, before continuing down the river for another hour or so.

 
That evening, we soaked up the scenery at some bars in the town. There's no shortage of bars in Vang Vien, with it being a fully fledged backpacker town, but there is an 11pm bar curfew throughout the whole of Laos, so no wild nights out for us here!

The shocking truth about Laos

The flight to Laos was really quick- we were so glad we picked it over the the other option which was a 30 hour bus journey! We landed at 6pm in Vientiane, probably one of the smallest and quietest capital cities we've ever visited. We stepped out of the airport to 36 Degree Centigrade heat(!) although little did we realise that the temperature would drop into the 20's in the next few days, accompanied by some rain.

There isn't much to do in Vientiane, so after seeing a few Temples (standard) we headed to a place called COPE, a centre set up to help those affected by unexploded bombs (UXO's) in Laos. We knew very little about this and had only heard about it from our Lonely Planet guide, but by the end of our visit we were pretty shocked by what had happened to this tiny country.

A little history lesson (info borrowed from various sites):

Between 1964 and 1973, the United States flew more than half a million bombing missions over the country in an attempt to block the flow of North Vietnamese arms and troops through Laos, despite the country being declared a neutral zone by the UN to avoid being drawn into the war in Vietnam.

As a result, Laos became the most heavily bombed country, per capita, in history. A planeload of bombs dropped every 8 minutes, 24 hours a day for 9 years on a neutral country!!

'Bombies', which are the bomblets or submunitions from cluster bombs are the most common cause of UXO incidents in Laos.  Roughly a third of all of the patients who are provided with prostheses through COPE are UXO survivors.

The failure rate of these bombs is thought to be as high as 30%, meaning that threat of unexploded bombs is still alive today: it is estimated that there are 300 new casualties from UXO incidents every year in Laos, nearly one everyday.

In 2010, 108 nations from around the world signed a treaty to ban the use of cluster bombs because of the devastating effect they have as well as their unreliability rate, however the US (along with Russia and China) have yet to sign it and continue to stockpile the bombs for possible future use.

We were pretty shocked at learning all of this, especially as we'd never heard about it before.

The next morning we had a typical Laos breakfast for backpackers: a baguette and an omelette. We left Vientiane and headed to crazy Vang Vien!