Thursday 2 August 2007

Tranquil Times at Luang Prabang


We had arranged our hotel online before arriving in Laos, and they very helpfully came and picked us up from the airport for a small fee. Our hearts sank though when we discovered our bedroom to be a cramped and dark room with a window opening straight onto a wall. There was also what sounded like a party getting into full swing in the next room. We asked if there were any other rooms and for about US$1 more per night we were moved to the biggest room in the hotel, with two walls of windows, loads of space and a massive big balcony. We still had the evening left and took it upon ourselves to go exploring Luang-Prabang, our home for the next 4 or 5 days.

There is a hill in the center of town with a Wat at the peak which you can climb to the top of for a fee. We didn't want to waste a fee's worth of visit by going when it was about to shut so we climbed halfway up the hill, to the ticket counter and watched the sunset from there. The setting sun-light in Laos has the most beautiful golden colour to it. It's not something that your eyes adjust to either, it remains this golden colour and tints everything around in a slight veneer. One of the reasons for this may be because the air is so clean. Luang-Prabang is by no means in the dark ages, void of industrialisation, but the air pollution is much lower than any of Lao's neighbouring countries. Following the sunset we took a walk through the evening markets that set up on the side streets at dusk. These sold an array of really eye catching craft items, reputedly made in the surrounding hill-tribe villages. Items included, intricately carved little boxes made of marble, paper lanterns, fabrics, clothing, cushions, wooden ornaments and all kinds of other paraphernalia.

We found a coffee shop just round the corner from our hotel, called Joma, which became our regular breakfast spot and retreat from the heat, serving some of the best coffee we have found so far on our travels, Laos grown. Fueled and ready for action we spent our first full day wandering the peaceful streets and taking in the French colonial architecture and the flourishing gardens. Luang-Prabang is a quiet town (except for the motorbikes) where everyone wanders at about half pace, and every second person is a monk in robes. The town has managed to avoid falling victim to bland redevelopment over the decades and remains a picturesque postcard town from the colonial times (albeit a little rougher on the edges now). Food producers leave their produce drying out on the streets. We saw racks of sausage and trays of rice cakes and flocks of wide eyed birds licking their beaks. There's no supermarkets, or malls and only one ATM which only works some of the time, and is very fussy about which cards it accepts. Luang-Prabang feels like someone forgot to wind the clock up again and time is just coming to a rest for a while until someone else notices, which might be soon sadly, because despite it's underdevelopment, Luang-Prabang is very much bang in the centre of the tourist circuit and is not missed by anyone who is passing through.

We met a Kiwi couple, Simon and Amy who were staying in our hotel too, and arranged to share a minibus/tuc-tuc thing called a jumbo to a series of waterfalls and rock pools an hour out of town. The series of pools and falls which start somewhere high up a jungly hill side fall and meander for as long as it takes 20 minutes to walk the length of, and then continues beyond where you can reasonably get to in both directions. The falls and streams are punctuated continuously with rock pools and little lagoons. We weren't the only people there. Dozens of other jumbos and buses had parked up in the near-by car park, surrounded by stalls selling T-shirts and souvenirs but this little burst of entrpreneurism is a good ten minutes out, on the other side of the woods to the attraction itself. The rock pools are quite idyllic, and though they have been a little engineered at some point in the past, nature has retaken its foothold and has found a nice balance with it all. The pools are a beautiful turquoise colour and the water was not too cold, in fact we timed it right to be plunging in at the heat of day, finding a quiet pool with no-one else in it until the hordes saw us and decided you must be allowed in after all and bounded in to join us.

As a bonus, we also stumbled across a little bear sanctuary nearby where free of charge you could watch rescued moon-bears tussle with each other and generally wreck the vegetation thrown into their compound for dinner. Moon bears are half-sized bears with a big silver V under their necks which apparently reflects moonlight. They had a nice big play pen with plenty of stuff to keep them happy, and we had a good quarter hour or so watching them before buying a t-shirt with paw prints on it and leaving them be.

The following day we took a boat trip on the Mekong, to make amends for our not sailing down it from Thailand. We went to see a cave full of Buddha statues and ornaments which people have taken to the cave throughout the decades to retire them. The king used to come here every year as a sign of devotion to ensure good times for his country but unfortunatley, the good times didn't last long for him and the army took charge and took him away where he had to see out the rest of his reduced days, ironically in a cave.

A final day in town and we enjoyed lots more coffee, finally climbed to the top of the hill to see the full sunset and then went to the market where we really went a bit silly and bought far too many things which, though a bargain to buy, ended up costing us an arm and a leg to send home from our next stop which was Vientiane, the capital of Laos, and an 8 hour bus trip down the road from Luang-Prabang.

No comments: