Luang Prabang

After getting back to life I checked out of my room, left my luggage and went out for some gift shopping. When getting back I got my luggage and made a run for the bus and arrived nicely at 3.55 pm. with a scheduled departure of 4 pm. The ride to Luang Prabang was expected to be a though one because of possible bad roads in Laos.

Expectations can be very wrong.. This bus was a sleeper; meaning that it did not have any seats just beds sized for a small Asian. There where 3 rows of beds and 2 levels, my bed was at the second line on top at the left window side. The upper middle beds even had seat belts. After getting in I first had to argue in Mandarin to get some space to store my backpack, after some serious effort I managed to put it away somewhere. My position was one arm hanging in the path and the other one out of the window, this way I was planning to endure this 30 hour ride. One of the Chinese guys with an annoying ring tone and smoking an occasional cigarette in the bus was funny enough to complain about my open window. So I closed it for about 2 seconds..

The next morning we had a stop, most probably for breakfast. There was a girl coming up to me to change some money, the rate (1:1240) was ok. So I let her convert the amount and let her do it again and asked her to multiply it with 1240 instead of 1200 as she told me. Sometimes people make an 'accidental' mistake in their favor.. After hanging around for some more minutes the driver came up to me slamming his hand with his fist. Apparently I needed to get my passport stamped, down the road and had just 30 minutes left. So I went for a walk and by the time I found the boarder I found it would open in 10 minutes. While I needed to have my passport stamped I went through without any luggage just my wallet, money belt, passport and phone and no bags on me. After checking out in China and expecting the bus to follow later I walked to the Laos border and applied for another visa. Apparently they preferred to receive USD while the conversion to Laos Kip was really bad, but what can you say when you NEED a visa. So I covert the loss with some of my left over USD. After that, once again I declared to be healthy and entered Laos.

By then I had found some of the other passengers and we waited for the bus, so we could get back in. We drove for about 1km until another unexplained stop of at least one hour. The roads through the mountains of Northern Laos turned out to be level and short on potholes which was a unexpected relieve, while I remembered some bumpy rides in the country. Now I could just enjoy the mountainous scenery, laying down in my bed with my head dangling out of the window. It was a similar experience as I had in Mongolia, while it was very cloudy, however when the clouds moved away the landscape showed it's true beauty, decorated with houses on poles (in case of mudslides and the cattle seems to seek shelter there) traditional dresses and loads of hard working people joined by kids playing around.

Around 10 pm the driver was yelling something that to me sounded like Luang Prabang, so I checked and got out. I asked one of the tuk-tuk drivers to take me to a certain guesthouse, which was full and moved to the neighbours.

The next morning I found out about the huge baguette like sandwiches Laos turned out to be famous about, thanks to the French. I searched for a boat connection to Vientiane, which unfortunately wasn't present. So I just enjoyed the city, the temples and was invited to view the local boat races. I joined some guys on a boat to move down the river to find the riversides crowded with people. They parked the boat and went up to get some local snacks and drinks. It was a nice experience to see the boats racing by.

The following day I went for a walk to find a reasonable deal to some waterfalls, the past few days of rain seemed like a proper investment for some nice waterfalls. I ended up with a Polish photographer an older British guy with blue striped hair and a friendly French couple. All stages of the waterfall turned out to be a total of 50/60 meters. First we went for a swim, used a rope to swing in and jumped from one of the stages 3/4 meters in the pool underneath. Simple pleasure is all I need.. After trying to make up for my lack of beach time we walked up and ended up at the top of the waterfall looking down on various plateaus of water running down.