Laos

After the hectic pace of Phnom Penh, Ho Chi Minh, and Hanoi... Vientiane was a lovely change of pace!!!  Not only were the people of this small capital city friendly and not pushy, you could actually cross the road without fear of death!!!  The city itself is very quiet and laid back with a small number of things to do... but is still quite pretty with the Mekong River, and Thailand on the other side, on its southern border.  It was also a nice change because the food in Vientiane was better than anywhere in Vietnam we thought!  It must have been the Chinese dumpling restaurant that we couldn't walk by on the corner near our hotel!  But, the BBQ street-side restaurants were also good and relatively inexpensive.

After Vientiane, we took a four hour minivan ride up to Vang Vieng... Our first thought was that we should have stayed in Vientiane another day or two!  Vang Vieng, though small and quiet (in the daytime), is a haven for young'ns looking for a party.  The biggest attraction is tubing down the Nam Khan River past an endless row of riverside bars attracting you in with cheap booze and loud music.  We didn't see the party happen first hand, as we chose to tube down the river in the morning when everybody was asleep, but we could see how it could be a big party and become dangerous as some of the videos we saw showed.  Many of these bars have man-made slides or rope swings that drop you into the shallow and brown Nam Khan River... ie. you don't see the bottom.  The YouTube videos we took a look at before doing the tubing showed scores of people getting injured, including one person having his head cavity stuffed with something, probably to ensure it doesn't implode or bleed out profusely during transport.  The scenes we saw while eating in the village in the evenings also showed some of the carnage, as not a hour went by without us seeing someone with a bandaged leg, arm, or limp in their step!  The scenery in Vang Vieng, though, is absolutely fantastic... karsts jutting out all around the river... making it a beautiful and peaceful tubing ride in the morning!

After a couple days in Vang Vieng, we took the VIP bus to Luang Prabang.  VIP indeed.  As we rolled up to the bus in our tuktuk, I asked myself, why are the windows open?  And why does the bus look like it's 20 years old with its taillights broken.  Well, this 205km journey through the absolutely fantastic scenery of Kasi province, turned into a 7-hour open-air journey smelling of engine fumes!  The scenery did make the time pass by more quickly though!  If you are ever in Laos, do the journey southward but in a new minivan!  And sit on the right!

We had come to Luang Prabang a couple days early, as we decided that we didn't want to do two 7-hour bus journeys to Phonsavan just to see the Plain of Jars (fields of large urns that are possibly littered with unexploded ordnance (AKA bombs leftover from the Vietnam War))...

Luang Prabang is a lovely city full of temples.  You can see most of these temples in a day, actually you can see almost everything the city has to offer in 2-3 days.  Since we had 5, we took it easy and only did a bit each day.  Even then, we didn't go to the Pak Ou Caves where thousands of old Buddha statues are stored.  After a while, once you've seen one buddha/temple in Southeast Asia, you've seen them all!  Luang Prabang does host a magnificient waterfall though... about 27kms to the west... Kuang Xi Waterfall.  It's a 70m terraced waterfall where you can swim in some of the ponds that form under the falls... very refreshing as the water was about 18 degrees Celcius in my opinion.  Just like a pool in Vancouver in the summer.  The food in Luang Prabang was also good, but not as good as Vientiane.  We do miss our crepe vendor though, who we went back to every night!!!  Crepe with peanut butter and chocolate... yum!  And the French type too!