Luang Prabang, Laos
By Dave • April 1st, 2008
There’s not much to say about the two day slow boat from Chiang Kong, Thailand, to Luang Prabang, Laos, apart from it takes two days, it moves slowly, and it’s a boat. Except, I suppose, from the fact that ours was packed with backpackers, to whom I’m slowly developing a fairly deep-seated and irrational aversion. Sure, I wish I got on with everyone we met, but when they’re fat, football shirt-wearing idiots making wanker gestures at fishermen (yes, really), cracking into the beers at nine in the morning and haggling over 50p packets of crisps, it’s hard to be tolerant.
At the end of day one on the boat, we stopped in Pak Beng, a footnote on the Mekong river. We stayed in a period French villa-style hotel for the low sum of 200 baht, a sum which seemed higher when the electricity was turned off at half ten in the evening. So on the one hand we stayed in a nice building – our first for some time. On the other hand, we peed in the dark.
I was ill in Thailand. Ill enough, in fact, to warrant three nights in the Thai border town of Chiang Kong, a town in which
I tried steak while we were in Chiang Kong, but was unable to finish the grey, chewy culinary catastrophe that turned up. Gritting my teeth, and unable to face fried noodles, I gave steak another go in Café des Arts on Luang Prabang’s main strip.
I almost cried. Instead of reconstituted hamburger meat and wet chips, the waiter arrived with a beautiful, red steak with chunky chips. It was my first real meal in days, and that meal, which cost us under £10 combined, may have been one of the best I’ve ever had.
Luang Prabang is an improbably-named, beautiful place. It’s the cultural highpoint of Laos, and its French heritage is in the architecture and the menus of its centre. For the first time for ages we broke through the double-digit barrier for hotels: ours was one of the most expensive we’d visited in south-east Asia at $10 a night. That bought us our own toilet, clean linen (so dubious were we about the mattresses in Chiang Kong, we’d slept in our cotton sleeping bags). Our happiness peaked, though, when we noticed the air conditioner. Despite the 32-degree heat (that’s 102ish for those stuck in the land of Farenheit), air-conditioning is a strictly optional extra.
On our second day we visited Kuang Si, a waterfall 30km out of Luang Prabang. There are two ways of getting there (three if you suicidally hire a bike and attempt to ride it in the incredible heat): group minibus and tuk-tuk. The group minibuses had all left by the time we got around to leaving our air-conditioned paradise, so tuk-tuk it was.
It should have taken an hour to reach, but no sooner were we in the back of the tuk-tuk (in truth a pickup truck with a metal awning on the back and a weak stab at cushioned benches) than the driver poked his head out of his window and shouted, “we go pick up my wife and son, eh?” It was a sweet question, asked sweetly, and we agreed. We arrived at a small white concrete building on the outskirts of town, and his wife emerged carrying a two year-old and – I loved this – a tiny inflatable rubber ring.
Later we found we’d got off lightly: another backpacker told us that on the way back from Kuang Si, their driver had stopped unbidden at a wedding he’d agreed to go to. The plus side, he said, was cheap drinks.
Kuang Si’s waters are a striking light blue; it is as close to jungle paradise as you can get. For the brave, there’s a rope swing and the opportunity to leap from a 20-foot high waterfall. I once fractured my skull by falling out of a bunk bed, so I tend not to tempt fate by standing atop high things. I kept myself entertained by getting a daring knee-deep in the water and trying not to drop my camera.
Mendy, of course, was halfway towards the top of the waterfall before I realised a thing. She wobbled for a second, providing me with a detailed mental image of her head hitting the rocks, and then, intentionally and, of course, gracefully, plummeted towards the water. Then she tried the rope swing.
We were in Luang Prabang for three days. There are beautiful temples on the tops of hills and approximately eight million ways of getting ripped off. Still, Luang Prabang is stunning; a nifty example of a place that’s as fun to visit as it is to say and spell. It has some of the best restaurants in the country – for the first time since we’d left England, we had wine with our meals. There’s a great night market in which Mendy bought some all-but see-through trousers (in our defence, it was dark, and hey, we might need the money later), and you can buy local Laos coffee at the cafes. Best of all, we ran into two of our fellow trans-Siberian travellers, a welcome relief after spending three days dodging backpackers.
Dave had the strange compulsion to convert most of his pictures from Luang Prabang into black and white. I’m not sure what that says about me, but the results can be found in the Flickr set. Even more of them can be found in the other Flickr set.
Tags: asia, aversion, beautiful place, border town, chewy, chunky chips, crisps, football shirt, french heritage, french villa, fried noodles, hamburger meat, highpoint, Laos, lightbulb, luang prabang laos, mekong river, pak beng, slow boat, style hotel, thai border, villa style
When you say Mendy gracefully plummeted towards the water, is that a photo of her there? You know, there, up a bit, to the right, dodgy knee position.
And I’m struggling to understand what beer-swilling, crisp-haggling, beer-bellied tourists are doing in Laos. Haven’t they heard of Bournemouth?
It looked more graceful when she was moving, honest.
Not that much more graceful, I suppose, but I think “plummeted” is accurate.
I’m not sure what the idiots are doing here, either. I suppose they’ve gone international.