Luang Prabang
The bus to Luang Prabang left at 8 pm, and it was fully packed. We were told that the trip takes about eight hours, but I had heard that the roads can be in bad shape during the rainy season so I wasn't that optimistic. It was already dark when we started driving but from what I saw the roads seemed to be ok. Despite the good roads we kept stopping every once in a while in the middle of nowhere. I have absolutely no idea what the reason for these stops was. There usually was absolutely nothing but trees and small mountains around the places where we stopped and no one entering or leaving the bus. These stops could take as long as twenty minutes and they happened maybe once in two hours.
Hiding Inna
After eight hours it was clear that the trip was going to take a lot longer than they had told us, and finally at 8 am, twelve hours after leaving, the bus arrived at Luang Prabang. We were dead tired and, if possible, hated buses even more than before. At the bus station there was someone offering accommodation. The offer sounded good enough and we hopped on his over-sized tuk-tuk. Ten minutes later we entered the really cosy guest house, paid 60 000 kips for the room and went to sleep.
In the evening we went for a walk around the town to see what makes this place one of the UNESCO world heritage sites. Luang Prabang is a town like I've never seen before. There weren't any tall buildings and the jungles were surrounding us. Everything was green and there were almost no cars at all. People mostly used bicycles, mopeds or tuk-tuks to move longer distances.
Mekong showing its better side.
We visited one small temple right next to our guest house and even paid the relatively high entrance fee to the monks. I hope they used the money wisely as the temple wasn't really worth the money :). We continued down the street to see the Mekong again, and this time the river showed us its true form. The water didn't look like something I would like to swim in, but the surroundings and the atmosphere were a lot more pleasant than in Vientiane. Add a beautiful sunset to the equation, and you got a perfect recipe for a relaxing evening!
Later in the evening we did something we don't usually do. We went shopping. We bought souvenirs for ourselves and for our relatives. We bought nice hand-made lamps, small paintings and a couple of bottles of snake booze. Everything was really cheap, and the biggest problem was fitting it all into our already full backpacks! We also bought tickets to elephant riding and bus tickets to a waterfall nearby and back to Vientiane. We thought about flying back to Bangkok instead of taking the bus, but it would have been too expensive.
A colorful fellow
Inside the expensive temple
Gruesome paintings in one of the temple buildings
This shows quite well what it looks like in Luang Prabang.
Boathouses and their inhabitants
A huge snail!
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