Monk Stalking
Luang Prabang would have to be one of my favourite spots in Asia, its beautiful and clean, streets are actually paved, its Laos so everyone is friendly. Unfortunately its everyone elses favourite place and we had a tough time finding a room under $15. Normally we don’t pay more than $6 so we weren’t too happy with paying double but after asking over 10 places we settled with a $10 average room with rats running around in the roof. Luckily we found a much nicer $6 place in the morning for our last 2 nights.
In the evening there is an amazing night market so we checked out that and made shopping lists, so much to buy! We had a pretty low key day our first full morning there, cheap baguettes for breakfast which is always good. Walked up a hill to have a look at some important temple thing. It’s a really small town so didn’t take long to walk around, really beautiful buildings and lots of temples. The town is a full of monks so every so often there are flashes of orange robes followed by tourists with cameras, myself included. I don’t know what is about monks but they look so cool wandering around in groups, unfortunately its actually really offensive to hover around taking photos, and while some people seem to think its fine I feel too bad, so I spent most of the time trying to secretly stalk them. Tash thought I was crazy but did end up getting a few good photos. Early in the morning is the alms ceremony where the monks all walk down the street collecting food offerings from people. So I made us get up at 6am 2 mornings to sit in the coffee shop across the street and secretly take photos of the monks. Its really cool to watch but some tourists get a bit carried away despite the signs everywhere with ‘rules’. But anyway we did get to see lots of monks.
We did a lot of shopping at the night market (all very cheap) and ate at some excellent street buffets, with various meat on sticks. We spent our other full day on a tour, first out to see some caves with lots of statues of Buddha in them. It was OK, it just took over an hour on a boat to get there which wasn’t so fun, and we had to do cultural village visits on the way. We tried to find a tour company that didn’t do village visits as they are inevitably awkward but no, all of them proudly advertise it.
After our cultural morning it was straight into a mini van and out to these amazing waterfalls. Set in beautiful forests , first you walk past bears and a tiger in cages…weird. The falls are amazing, you can swim in them but unfortunately I had forgotten my togs. Still was really amazing to see, all these little waterfalls coming from a big one into these aqua pools, the colour of waterfall was really incredible, looked like a swimming pool. In true Laos safety you could basically stand at the very edge of a massive drop. I somehow talked Tash into climbing up a massive hill to the very top of the waterfall. Not the best track and came down mostly on our butts just in time for our mini bus ride back to town, via a village of course.
(food on sticks, yum)
After 3 nights we were off again. We were planning to go across to Chang Mai in Thailand. Apparently there was a bus but for some reason it wasn’t happening at the moment so there were boats, either a 2 day slow boat or a 10 hour fast boat. Both cost heaps, especially the fast one but we didn’t really have time for a 2 day boat ride. So we’d asked a few places the day before about the speed boat and went back to book it but now…no speedboat. Why not? Pollution, apparently….something didn’t seem so right. Another place we asked at had one of those guys who just couldn’t lie and when we asked him, he tried to avoid the topic and eventually told us there had been a crash! They hadn’t died but just “got very wet, very very wet”
So no speedboat, probably a good thing!
So we were back on the bus back down to Vietianne, over the worst road ever again. I’d heard stories about this stretch of the road being one of the most dangerous because of bandits and up until a couple of years ago they recommended you didn’t drive on it. But I didn’t think it was that bad until we had an armed guard on the bus, just sitting across from us…a little disturbing but we made it back to the capital safe.
Tags: blgosherpa, Laos, luang-prabang, monks, northern-laos, Travel
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