Day 133 - Sunday, June 3
Unlike elsewhere I had been in southeast asia (with maybe one or two exceptions), Luang Prabang was a cleaner, quieter city that seemed to go to bed early and wake early. There was less traffic, less touts, and it was a quiet, pleasant town. I stayed at
Riverside Guesthouse, which was okay, but I think there's probably better options.
On Sunday, I first checked out
Wat Xieng Thong which is a 16th century temple, and supposed to be one of the highlights of Luang Prabang. Unfortunately they were doing a lot of preservation/renovation work when I was there, so there was scaffolding and other such things set up throughout, detracting at bit from the experience:
Then, against my better judgment, I decided to climb up the couple hundred steps
to the temple at the top of Phousi Hill, which has nice panoramic views of Luang Prabang and the surrounding countryside.
The top was a nice place to relax for a while, and I read for a bit and made friends with this very pregnant cat that appeared to live at the temple.
When I got back to the bottom, I checked out a few other temples around town:
Day 134 - Monday, June 4
Monday, I headed to Kuang Si falls on the outskirts of town. The multi-tiered falls were beautiful and the lower tiers provided a good spot to swim.
Located near the waterfall was an Asiatic Black Bear sanctuary filled with rescued bears that were entertaining to watch.
Sadly, they are farmed for their bile, which is supposed to posses great healing powers.
On the way back from the the falls, we stopped by a Hmong village, where I watched some village boys play a Hmong/Lao version of bowling involving flip-flops instead of bowling balls and a pile of empty plastic bottles instead of pins:
I had been trying to decide whether to do an overnight sleeper bus to my next stop, Vang Vieng, or to spend an extra night in Luang Prabang and take the daytime bus the next day. Even though I had heard it was a pretty drive, and I was worried that finding a hotel in Vang Vieng might be difficult if I arrived in the middle of the night on the sleeper bus, I opted for the sleeper mostly because I really wanted the extra space provided, and I was ready to head on after 2 days in Luang Prabang.
While I was waiting for a ride to the bus station, I had perhaps my favorite experience in Luang Prabang. One of the Lao guys working at the guesthouse where I was waiting asked me if I knew how to use Excel. I'm no expert, but I figured I probably knew enough to answer his questions. Over the course of the next 15-20 minutes, we went through some very basic operations in Excel, and I never imagined someone could be so excited about knowing how to use Excel. When I taught him how to use the "sum" function, he was as excited as a kid at christmas. It was a pretty cool experience.
That night I got on the sleeper bus, which had an interesting layout, with 2 aisles and 3 seats across the width of the bus and then kind of a top and bottom bunk for each seat, except that it wasn't flat like a bed. The seats reclined to about a 30-degree angle because the feet of the person behind you were meant to fit beneath the back of your seat. Can't seem to find any pictures online - probably because it's a brand new bus.
I tried to fall asleep, but that was somewhat impossible, both because it was very early still, and because I was terrified. I had a seat at the front of the bus such that I could see out the windshield, and it was one of those bus rides in developing countries that you read about. We were on a winding mountain-side, half-dirt, half-paved road. It was so foggy, you couldn't see more than 50ft in front of the bus, and the driver was flying around turns, inches from careening off the the edge of the road, narrowly missing head on collisions when cars came from the other direction. Eventually I decided that the best bet was to just not look.
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