In the back of a tuk tuk we bounced and sped out of Vientiane to Buddha Park. About 26 km outside the city is a small park by the Mekong filled with numerous different styles of Buddha statues.

Budda feeling a bit grey

The entire park was built in 1958 by one man who left Laos shortly after and crossed the river to Thailand where he built another identical park. A great place to spend a few minutes even though the ride out to it does take quite a while.

Open wide!

The Park

In the park

Back Demon!

Entrance is 8000 Kip for you and your camera too. Don’t miss the inside of the giant structure just by the entrance!

Very little to tell of these last several days. Funny, this whole traveling around the world thing requires lots of moving around. We took another awful all day bus from Luang Prabang to Vientiane and spent the next couple of days hanging out, walking around the city, and just generally waiting on our Vietnamese visa coming in another couple days.

Warning!

Travel Tip: – Vietnamese Visa in Vientiane, Laos

In case you are heading Vietnam from Laos, you can easily apply for your visa at the Vietnam Embassy, nearby Victory Gate. The application process took maybe 10 minutes to fill out the paper, turn it in, and leave again. From the riverside we caught a tuk tuk to the embassy for 10,000 Kip/pp. The visa (for Americans) cost $45 or 405,000 Kip (about $46-47 depending on the current exchange rate).

At the last minute we decided to jump on a minibus heading for the Khuangsi Waterfall, about 30km outside Luang Prabang. The waterfall is actually a series of different size pools with ice cold, aqua blue water in the middle of the woods.

Backflip into the pool

On the way through we stopped by the Bear Rescue Center to visit some cute moon bears. We got there just in time to see them being fed lunch so they were pretty excited to get out into their larger enclosures with the playground.

Moon Bear

The falls

The falls cost 20,000 Kip admission and the Bear Rescue Center is technically free but donations are appreciated. We had a great day being out and about at the falls. Nice to be out of the city for a bit!

We walked to the top of Phousi Hill, the site of a very old wat that looks over the city. It was a nice breezy view—we could even see the puny airport from the top! It’s been pretty hot in Luang Prabang and it was a welcome chance to get out of the heat for a bit. We were so winded for climbing a few stairs that we had to go repair to our room to watch HBO. (What’s that you say? Burned out? Nooooo, of course not!)

Vew over the city

Stupa at the top

Luang Prabang is a whirling haven of tourists. All kinds come here and plague this unremarkable town. But regardless, there is a pretty awesome night market here because of them. Right around sunset, you can buy all manner of Lao souvenirs.

Fabric in the night market

Good stuff like a very useful cloth embroidered kleenex box cover or apron, the usual “silver” (pot metal) jewelry that can turn your skin green within days!, t-shirts, scarves by the thousand, some imported Chinese crap, and lots of food vendors.

In the night market

Still we had a pretty good time shopping and even got some pretty good stuff along the way. If you are looking for some good souvenirs or presents in Laos, Luang Prabang is the place to get them. Prices are not too bad for the most part, a surprise compared to how expensive food and lodging are in the city. Even if you are not wanting to shop, the night market is a great place to get some cheap dinner!

Street sandwich stand

Two travel days right in a row. Yuck! We just can’t seem to sit still! On the way from Muang Sing to Luang Nam Tha, we were stuffed into an 11 passenger van that was actually transporting 16 passengers. Saben’s seat was a fold down metal bar and Lin’s was some random part of the van behind the front reclined-passenger seat, facing the other 15 passengers.

Girl waiting at the bus stop

With one of many unscheduled stops on the 2 hour journey, the driver bought 2 chickens from a sizable pile of other dead birds and animals. One of the other passengers bought a dead leopard cat for its fur. A nice looking fur but a little limp. The poachers obviously wouldn’t let us take any photos but pretty neat just the same.

Lao Laap, fried chicken

In Nam Tha, we dropped the bags in yet another guest house and get some lunch. Next day was a shitty 10 hour day filled with the sounds of Lao music videos. A full, un-ending 10 hours of suicide inducing behavior in futile attempts to just make it stop. If you have never seen a Lao music video, think of the worst 1980s American music video you can recall. Then multiply the lameness of it by 288, add some Lao lyrics, and perpetual slow motion. There, now you’ve got a Lao music video! They all look like something a 6th grader would put together sometime in early 1991. It’s honestly beyond painful. If the bus had been going fast enough, we would have happily thrown ourselves from the windows in hopes of the tires smashing us to bits. Instead, we arrived fully in tact at Luang Prabang well after dark. We ate dinner at a tent in the market. It was a chicken sandwich with lots of flies crawling all over. Tasty.

After a soggy breakfast of foul-tasting eggs, we walked to the market. This time of year there isn’t much to it—a few clothing and household good vendors, a few fruit sellers, and a couple of random-pieces-of-meat salesmen.

Not much in the market

In lieu of a costly tour, we decided to rent a motorbike and just drive ourselves around the area and see what we might come across. Just across from the market are two motorbike places that seem to sell, repair and rent all in one location. No one speaks English but they always have a calculator handy to tell you prices.

Up through the mountains

After overpaying for the rental and quite possibly also the gasoline at the filling station, we were off. A bit unsteady and a little jerky but still, we were off! The motorbikes available to rent are neither full on motorcycles nor regular mopeds. Instead they are manual shifting clutchless contraptions that take a bit of getting used to.

Us on our bumpy steed

We sped out of town and back toward Luang Nam Tha with frozen tears streaming across our faces and shivering violently. Despite the very hot sunshine yesterday when we arrived, this morning we woke up to a foggy very cold pants-and-sweaters morning. We expected it to warm up as the day went on but that never happened. We had the winding mountain road mostly to ourselves; there is so little traffic in Laos and that only consists of a few motorbikes and even fewer local buses. We sped by sprawling watermelon fields and farmers re-cutting the hill terraces in preparation for springtime planting. There were young children walking along the dirt roads who shouted “saibadee!” (hello) as we passed and the older kids and parents going in or out of the fields. Sugar cane, rubber trees, early corn, and melons cover the countryside. The mountains make for challenging work but the people use the land however they can.

Path through the country

The entire day we spent driving around Muang Sing and passed through several villages. Though we would have likely been warmly welcomed, we chose not to stop into any of the villages and disrupt the farm work and other daily chores going on. We received countless odd looks, a few waves and hellos but surprisingly, no one found us odd enough to stare at. The people we passed seemed to notice us about as much as anything else that might pass through their sightline in a given day, despite the fact that there are so few foreigners in Laos and certainly fewer out in the countryside. We didn’t pass any others all day, only locals but our guess is that the tours offered in town are meant to allow outsiders a look at traditional Lao life within certain willing villages who can profit from the exchange when tourists buy trinkets or fruit inside the village.

Girl selling trinkets by the road

The villages themselves are all small, each one consisting of something like 50-60 people (but that is only an estimate based on what we saw). There are plenty of kids out here and even as young as 6-7 they are often working in the fields alongside their parents and relatives. The villages themselves are large dirt compounds with grey and brown houses, usually set up on 9-10 foot high stilts. The houses are made of wood and palms sometimes as well. Hens and their cheeping chicks, fat pigs and piglets, an odd goat here or there, babies, and plenty of dogs can all be seen running around the compounds all day long. Everything is so dusty here and coated in a thin brown film. The villagers don’t smile much but they don’t seem unfriendly, maybe just more curious than unwelcoming. Most are busy working on chores and projects—taking care of the pantless babies dawdling around, chopping up bamboo, drying meat, or even weaving. Only the very old wear traditional dress but the rest wear a mixture of clothing. The girls and women tend to wear the Lao wrap skirt, richly embroidered on black fabric, and a “well-loved” t-shirt. Today being so cold, most everyone is wearing toboggans or hats of some kind and jackets that look like what most people in western countries would cast off for Goodwill. Maybe they are but they are getting another life and keeping these people warm today.

View through the valley

So while we saw some villages, we saw a more honest view. The mixture of tradition and western elements comes out of necessity and it is what it is. We have decided not to take a tour just for an hour of hiking to see a few birds and wild pigs and then go to the villages where the people don full traditional attire and peddle their “handmade” (let’s be honest, much of that stuff is brought in from China and only some of it is actually made by hand) wares at exorbitant prices to tourists. We had so much fun just driving around today, for being able to transport ourselves for the first time since we rented a car in Greece, and for being able to see so much more than the tour can provide. We highly recommend renting a motorbike and seeing some of Laos by yourself. The roads are really terrible and can be quite dangerous in places but there is little to no traffic and you can take your time as need be. You will have a great time and get a glimpse of what village life in Laos is really like.

Travel within Laos is an interesting experience. From the border town, we took a speedy but surprisingly cautious mini bus to Luang Nam Tha, about 4 hours north into the mountains. The road started off surprisingly good. It was paved and almost entirely free of pot holes or random missing sections. The farther we drove the worse the road became.

Down town Nam tha, Laos

It went from paved (good) to randomly paved and more pot holed than paved (not good) to dirt and large protruding rocks (really not good) to a series of all three kinds of roads but it was a complete surprise as to how long and when each section would pop up. (Hurray for surprises!)

At any rate, we did finally arrive to Nam Tha albeit with a few bleeding internal organs and a possibly a concussion, but hey we made it alive! Ok, ok maybe we’re exaggerating a bit here but the road really was terrible. What was even more interesting than the traveling part was that, during the 4 hours we drove, not once did we encounter a city or even a town of any sort. The only evidence of life we passed were several very small villages that could not have housed more than 50-100 people. There were not even any road side restaurants or stands aside from the one we stopped at that looked merely like another palm hut instead of the restaurant it was purported to be. We were the only foreigners in the mini bus. The other 9 people were all Lao guys so it was a pretty quiet ride when the driver was not singing along to slow-mo Lao music on his CD mixes.

Lao countryside

In Luang Nam Tha, we hopped into a local bus packed to the gills (can buses really have gills?) with locals heading to Muang Sing or somewhere along the way. Lucky for us, someone had saved the front seat and a little space on top of the engine block (covered with a big square wood box) for the two of us. We tip toed and hopped over the already boarded and unmoving locals inside to get to our seat and box. Poor Saben was the unlucky fellow today for the box seat and even more unlucky because the bus had to stop 3 times along the 60 km ride because the engine was overheating. It took us 2 hours to get to Muang Sing and with one burned bum in the process, we were very very happy to have finally arrived somewhere.

Muang Sing is a tiny town that appears to have about 300 people in residence. It’s a quiet (nay, practically silent) dusty little town that puts one to the mind of an old American western town with tumble weeds a blowin’ in the wind. Incidentally, there are no tumble weeds, just massive amounts of dust and grit blown into your eyes whenever you go outside. There are maybe 3 restaurants and maybe 10 guesthouses. Besides that there are 3-4 tour offices and a handful of shops with construction materials, hair dye, and some random unappetizing snacks imported from China collecting copious amounts of dust in the open front shops. There are more chickens, dogs, and pigs wandering around than locals and certainly even fewer foreigners. A welcome change indeed but really kind of strange to be a place so obviously inhabited but with so few people around and such a pervading silence that makes it a bit eerie. That’s not to say that it is a weird place. No, not at all, but it is very different from the majority of places we are used to going.

Down the main street, Muang Sing

With literally nothing to do, we ate breakfast-lunch-dinner in one meal since we hadn’t been able to eat anything yet today and retired to our room, apparently for the night even though it was only 5:30pm.

Up at 6:45AM. No breakfast. Tuk tuk to bus station, bus to Chiang Khong. No lunch. Crossed border on foot and boat ferried us across the gentle shallow river. Two minutes later, we bought our Laos visas for US$35 each and were zipping out of immigration. Uphill 20 seconds walking and we are officially “in town.” Welcome to Huaxy Xai, Laos side of the border with Chiang Khong (Thailand).

Crossing the Mekong into Laos

Town consists of a handful of buildings: 5-6 guesthouses, 3-4 restaurants and a few fruit vendors and snack stands. Besides that there is nothing much besides a single dusty but paved road running through town and the very few locals who are out and about are so quiet that it sounds as if the entire town is asleep. Maybe it’s the quiet, lazy river that makes everyone so mellow.

Sunset on the Mekong

We chose a dingy but adequate guest house for the night and tried one of the restaurants overlooking the river. Not great food but cheap enough. Coming from Thailand, everything here is cheap enough. Already Laos is shaping up to be a beautiful dusty country of friendly but quiet people.

We have very little to say about Thailand that is negative; if anything, it is subject to its own beauty. Everywhere is flooded with tourists and not just regular tourists but loads of loud, drunken, and culturally rude tourists. We are not just talking about Khao San road either. The economy is now largely funded by the tourist trade but is the slow prostitution of a people and culture destroying the very thing that has drawn people to the beautiful land for thousands of years? We are already looking forward to returning to Thailand and implore others to visit as well; we just ask that you be mindful of yourself and your actions.

(Click here to see the Thailand Photo Gallery)

Favorite moments:

• Fantastic food
• Amazing people
• Most beautiful beaches we have stood on
• Diving with Sharks
• Pink taxis
• Beautiful parks and ruins
• It wasn’t India
• Ease of life
• Street food

Not so great:

• Saben getting bitten by a stupid rabid dog
• Loud, drunken tourists on Khao San and off
• Hyper inflated tourist prices

Total Money Spent Per Person: $1123.78

Average Per Day Costs Per Person:

• Lodging: $5.39
• Food: $6.58
• Transportation: $3.63
• Misc: $8.83 (Beer, going out, guides, park entrance, etc.)

Total Average Per Day, Per Person: $24.43

Number of Days: 46