12 days in Laos

After Korea, the travels started with a short week in Thailand - 2 nights in Koh Phi Phi, 2 nights in Railay Bay, 1 night in Krabi and 2 nights in Bangkok. Maybe more on that later. It was a great start, relaxing, beautiful and delicious food! Then I met up with two friends from Korea, Amy and Misha, and we headed to Laos on a 16-hour bus from Bangkok.

The bus to Vientiane wasn't too horrible. It left at 6pm and we arrived around 9 or 10am the next morning. It was nothing like what we would later experience. We didn't spend any time in Vientiane. We immediately got on another bus to Vang Vieng for another 4-hour trip. Vang Vieng was a cute town, but full of young tourists that seemed to be looking to party. Not quite what we were looking for, but we were up for it. We rented some tubes and headed to the river for the notorious tubing.. and it was nothing like I had expected. It reminded me of what I'd picture a spring break in Cancun with young kids looking to get trashed. Kind of a waste of being in a beautiful town in a beautiful country, in my opinion. You get to the river, jump on a tube and make a zig-zag from bar to bar. People were swinging into the river from ropes, or going down some waterslides. We found out once we had arrived that this tubing thing is actually very dangerous, and 14 people have died this season alone. During the rainy season, the current can get very strong, and when kids have been drinking all day and taking tubes back after dark, things can get dangerous. We headed down the river in our tubes just as the sun was setting. Luckily, a few young boys that had done this tubing thing a few times already grabbed on to our tubes for a ride and helped us find our way. I got stuck going the wrong way at a fork in the river and had a really hard time fighting the current. It was also getting dark and was starting to rain, and after all of the stories, I was pretty terrified. These boys helped me though, and I finally made it to where I needed to go. I did find out the next day that either way at the fork would be okay, but at the time, I thought I was in some serious danger. Basically, the tubing was my least favorite part of Vang Vieng.

The next day, we did a full day tour for about $10. We went kayaking down the river for a few hours, went tubing into a cave with headlights strapped around our foreheads while holding onto ropes to get through and had an amazing lunch before having to kayak back to where all that tubing happens. Great day for $10! Our final day there, we rented bikes and went all around outside of town and found some kids playing in the river. We parked our bikes and went down and joined them. It's not rare for kids to be running around and jumping in naked, but some of them had little underwear on. Then, they disappeared and came back with some fruit that we wanted to try. They led us to the tree and helped us knock some fruit out of the 50+ foot tall tree and opened the fruit up for us. I think it was a pomelo, or definitely in the family. It was a really nice day, until I left my iPhone at a restaurant and didn't realize until we got on our horrible bus ride.

We got picked up for our bus to Luang Prabang at 9pm on the side of the road instead of at the bus stop. We definitely got screwed somehow. When I stepped onto the bus, I noticed it was a bus full of sleeping Laotians with babies sleeping on them, mud and water all over the floor and cargo boxes filling up the back half of the bus. No chance we were meant to be on that bus. It had been storming and parts of the road to Luang Prabang had been washed out. We heard some horror stories about this bus ride anyway, but we popped some sleeping pills and hoped for the best. It had just finished storming badly when we left Vang Vieng, and I was already upset about losing my music and iPhone. To make it short, it was the worst bus ride ever. The size of the potholes on this road are unimaginable, the roads were covered in wet mud that we were sliding down as our large bus was winding around the mountains. It actually crossed my mind that no one would know if we didn't make it because we had been put on this local bus that we shouldn't have been on. Our bus broke down at 2am and we waited on the bus for 2 hours or so until a foreigner bus passed and picked up the 3 of us. It was still a terrible bus though and was leaking water from the storm through the roof. After all that, we finally made it to beautiful Luang Prabang.

We spent 3 nights in Luang Prabang before taking a minivan to Nong Khiaw, a small town 3 hours north. We spent 2 nights there and took a 1-hour motorboat ride to a smaller town called Mong Noi. Luang Prabang is a really nice, touristy town that's more expensive than most other places we have been to so far, it's lovely though. It has tons of beautiful temples, great views and sunsets, it's right on the Mekong River, and it has a cute French influence. Nong Khiaw was a much quainter town, but it was nice as well. And although we only spent one day in Mong Noi, I really liked it there. There is one dirt road, some guesthouses and a few restaurants. It's beautiful there, and it's a much smaller town still than the one before. This was the first place that we had no air-con or fan because the electricity is only on from 6:30pm-10pm at the latest. We weren't well-prepared having no flashlights or candles and only dead iPods and small lighters. The mid-night trips to the toilet were a slight struggle, but a fun experience nonetheless. All in all, Laos was great, and we met some very cool people the last week there and we hope to meet up with them on the next leg of the trip in Vietnam.

Posting pictures has been a challenge so far since the Internet speed in Laos is so slow! I'll try posting some in Vietnam maybe!

Off to Hanoi tomorrow!