We’ve said goodbye to our tour group and leader yesterday – some are heading home, some off on other tours and 6 of us are sticking together for a few more days – weaning ourselves off the group! Since my last post, we’ve said goodbye to Laos and ‘Sawadee ka’ to Thailand. Laos and Thai language is very similar and I’m still saying the wrong hellos and thank yous! We spent one more day in Vang Vieng and 6 of us hired some bikes from the guest house and headed out to a cave about 7km from the village. The bikes we had were definitely pootle around flat town roads kinda bikes, and not dirt road hills kinda bikes (except Chris who got the only mountain bike…) so it wasn’t the most comfortable of rides, but the scenery was spectacular. 
Vang Vieng was a small village sitting by a meandering river surrounded by limestone hills until Laos reopened it’s borders in the late 80s and tourism kicked off and has turned the town into a beach like town with guesthouses, bars and restaurants springing up right, left and centre. It mainly caters for the ‘gap year’ crowd who want to do activities like climbing, tubing and trekking during the day and then party all night. We were quite happy to join them for a couple of days! Anyway… we cycled for about an hour through small villages and over some very rickety wooden bridges until we reached the cave area. We had a bit of a scramble up a path to reach the entrance of the cave, but it was well worth it. Unlike the cave we visited in Halong Bay, there are no electric lights installed (yet) and once we got out of the entrance of the cave, it was pitch black and we were glad we bought torches. We latched onto a couple who had hired a local guide so that we could find our way around the cave – think we may be still in there if we hadn’t! We got pretty sticky clambering around the cave, so we were very glad of a swim in the blue lagoon in the valley below the cave. From Vang Vieng, we headed north to Luang Prabang, the capital of Laos before the French moved it to Vientiane. The road snakes across the mountains that cover Laos, and it again provided amazing views over the hills and also passed through a number of villages populated by Hmong hill tribes. The day we drove was Hmong new year, so each village was holding a party and there were lots of girls dressed in traditional Hmong costumes. 
We arrived in Luang Prabang a nauseating 6 hours later and spent the evening eating tasty vegetarian buffet and meat-on-a-stick from market stalls (for 40p) and exploring the night market selling handicrafts. The following day we spent exploring the town and surrounding villages – we had a tour of a temple and the local market in the morning and then visited the palace that was inhabited by the King and Queen until 1957 when communism took over and the King and Queen were sent ‘north to be re-educated’ and no one has seen them since… 
After lunch, 6 of us jumped in the back of a jumbo (big tuk tuk) and headed out on a tour of local villages to see a blacksmith, rice wine distillery, silk weaving and paper making. It was really interesting to see how all the stuff we’d seen in the market is made, and made me much more appreciate the effort that goes into everything and maybe I shouldn’t be trying to get so much of a bargain in the market! 
We finished the tour a little early so our driver took us to visit the local office of Laos UXO – an NGO working to clear unexploded ordnance across Laos and also provide education about UXO to villages across the region. Unlike Cambodia and Vietnam, there was few battle fields in Laos, so the acres and acres of minefields that plague those countries don’t exist. Laos has it even worse. The American heavily bombed Laos during the Vietnam War to try and stop the Ho Chi Minh trail. The statistics of how many bombs were dropped on Laos are staggering and the whole of the country is still littered with UXO. This was a tad daunting the next day when we trekked for 3 hours over countryside and farmland through small villages to Kwang Si falls. Fortunately we didn’t see any suspicious pieces of metal, and the walk was well worth it as the falls were beautiful – photo opportunities muchly improved when some orange robed monks appeared! 
We had more monk-y photo time the next morning when we all got up bleary-eyed at 5.30am to take baskets of sticky rice to offer the monks of local temples as alms. We all sat on wee plastic stools on the pavement and popped balls of rice in the monks bowls as they passed. All happened very quickly and the guidebook had been very enthusiastic about the experience so it wasn’t as interesting as we had all expected, but was nice to have taken part in the tradition. 
From Luang Prabang, we spent two days on a slow boat on the Mekong heading upstream to the Thai border. In total we spent 18 hours on the boat with a stop overnight in a small riverside village. The views from the boat were great once the sun had burned the mist away and we spent many many hours playing cards, reading, playing cards, listening to music, playing cards, sleeping… ! 
We spent our last night in Laos at the border town of Huoy Xai and then had to say goodbye to a fabulous and beautiful country. We crossed the Mekong by longtail boat to get to Thailand and then we were on our way to Chiang Mai – our last stop on the 40 day tour from Bangkok. We had our final dinner at a restaurant owned by our tour leader, Bom, which was a nice way to say thanks and goodbye to him and to the people heading off. We’re now ‘proper travelling’ and have found ourselves a funky guesthouse to stay in for the next couple of nights and it is costing us all of 2 pounds each a night for a double room with bathroom! We’ve got a mountain bike/trekking day booked for tomorrow and that’s as far as our plans go for now. Time to do some internet searching for where to go next!
Vang Vieng was a small village sitting by a meandering river surrounded by limestone hills until Laos reopened it’s borders in the late 80s and tourism kicked off and has turned the town into a beach like town with guesthouses, bars and restaurants springing up right, left and centre. It mainly caters for the ‘gap year’ crowd who want to do activities like climbing, tubing and trekking during the day and then party all night. We were quite happy to join them for a couple of days! Anyway… we cycled for about an hour through small villages and over some very rickety wooden bridges until we reached the cave area. We had a bit of a scramble up a path to reach the entrance of the cave, but it was well worth it. Unlike the cave we visited in Halong Bay, there are no electric lights installed (yet) and once we got out of the entrance of the cave, it was pitch black and we were glad we bought torches. We latched onto a couple who had hired a local guide so that we could find our way around the cave – think we may be still in there if we hadn’t! We got pretty sticky clambering around the cave, so we were very glad of a swim in the blue lagoon in the valley below the cave. From Vang Vieng, we headed north to Luang Prabang, the capital of Laos before the French moved it to Vientiane. The road snakes across the mountains that cover Laos, and it again provided amazing views over the hills and also passed through a number of villages populated by Hmong hill tribes. The day we drove was Hmong new year, so each village was holding a party and there were lots of girls dressed in traditional Hmong costumes. We arrived in Luang Prabang a nauseating 6 hours later and spent the evening eating tasty vegetarian buffet and meat-on-a-stick from market stalls (for 40p) and exploring the night market selling handicrafts. The following day we spent exploring the town and surrounding villages – we had a tour of a temple and the local market in the morning and then visited the palace that was inhabited by the King and Queen until 1957 when communism took over and the King and Queen were sent ‘north to be re-educated’ and no one has seen them since… After lunch, 6 of us jumped in the back of a jumbo (big tuk tuk) and headed out on a tour of local villages to see a blacksmith, rice wine distillery, silk weaving and paper making. It was really interesting to see how all the stuff we’d seen in the market is made, and made me much more appreciate the effort that goes into everything and maybe I shouldn’t be trying to get so much of a bargain in the market! We finished the tour a little early so our driver took us to visit the local office of Laos UXO – an NGO working to clear unexploded ordnance across Laos and also provide education about UXO to villages across the region. Unlike Cambodia and Vietnam, there was few battle fields in Laos, so the acres and acres of minefields that plague those countries don’t exist. Laos has it even worse. The American heavily bombed Laos during the Vietnam War to try and stop the Ho Chi Minh trail. The statistics of how many bombs were dropped on Laos are staggering and the whole of the country is still littered with UXO. This was a tad daunting the next day when we trekked for 3 hours over countryside and farmland through small villages to Kwang Si falls. Fortunately we didn’t see any suspicious pieces of metal, and the walk was well worth it as the falls were beautiful – photo opportunities muchly improved when some orange robed monks appeared! We had more monk-y photo time the next morning when we all got up bleary-eyed at 5.30am to take baskets of sticky rice to offer the monks of local temples as alms. We all sat on wee plastic stools on the pavement and popped balls of rice in the monks bowls as they passed. All happened very quickly and the guidebook had been very enthusiastic about the experience so it wasn’t as interesting as we had all expected, but was nice to have taken part in the tradition. From Luang Prabang, we spent two days on a slow boat on the Mekong heading upstream to the Thai border. In total we spent 18 hours on the boat with a stop overnight in a small riverside village. The views from the boat were great once the sun had burned the mist away and we spent many many hours playing cards, reading, playing cards, listening to music, playing cards, sleeping… ! We spent our last night in Laos at the border town of Huoy Xai and then had to say goodbye to a fabulous and beautiful country. We crossed the Mekong by longtail boat to get to Thailand and then we were on our way to Chiang Mai – our last stop on the 40 day tour from Bangkok. We had our final dinner at a restaurant owned by our tour leader, Bom, which was a nice way to say thanks and goodbye to him and to the people heading off. We’re now ‘proper travelling’ and have found ourselves a funky guesthouse to stay in for the next couple of nights and it is costing us all of 2 pounds each a night for a double room with bathroom! We’ve got a mountain bike/trekking day booked for tomorrow and that’s as far as our plans go for now. Time to do some internet searching for where to go next!
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