PAK OU CAVES

Don, Norma, Ingrid and I hired our own little boatman to take us along the Mekong to see the PakOu caves. They are about 25km from Luang Prabang up the Mekong river at the mouth of the Nam Ou. The caves in the Limestone cliffs are packed full of hundreds if Buddha images. And at the lunar new year many Local people go to pray at the caves.

It took about six hours round trip with lunch at a little riverside cafe and the scenery along the river was wonderful.

Oh and for all of you who messaged me about the massages !! you may be worried I have not had any for a long time...

well I did manage to have a couple of foot massages in Luang Prabang!!

I also took a hair raising bus trip up the mountain to see the Tat Kuang Si waterfalls. The bus tyres were bald, so the bus was sliding all over the road. The driver also seemed to be in a particularly bad mood. He was playing chicken with all the other vehicles on the road, and thankfully winning!! All the passengers were just stunned into silence! When he parked the bus it is kept rolling so he wedged a stone behind the wheels and walked off. It is strange that I would not dream of getting on a vehicle like that at home, but here it just seems the thing to do!!
But the journey was worth it when I saw the multitiered waterfall tumbling over limestone formations into a series of cool,turquoise-green pools.I had a fantastic swim even though the water was freezing!




The driver made everyone wait until he was ready to go and had finished his game of pool with the locals.He was not bothered that some tourists were shouting at him to come back to the bus. But it put him in a sufficiently bad mood to make for another interesting journey down the mountain. I am sure he knew how scared everyone was.
I was so relieved that we stopped at a village to see local craftwork for a while, so that I could steady my nerves.


And when we got back to Luang Prabang he stopped the bus at the outskirts of the town and told us all we had to walk the rest of the way. He really was the John Cleese of bus drivers!

LUANG PRABANG

Sandwiched between Thailand and Vietnam ,Laos is a little bit if paradise! Although it is famous for being the most bombed country in the world it maintains an air of calm that makes you unwind.
It has only been open to tourists for a short time and that is one if its beauties. I stayed in Luang Prabang ,which is a really lovely place along the Mekong river, for a week. It is still not too touristy and it is not overrun by traffic, so it is easy to unwind and take a step back from the hustle and bustle of life on the road.

The locals are such nice and friendly people and

(Sorry liz I know you do not like the photos at this angle!)


particularly loved their night market. Every night they put up their stalls along the roads which are closed to traffic. They are such nice and friendly people.
I tried out some of the local food with a group of people I had met on the Mekong river trip and a fantastic 75 year old German lady who was travelling on her own to Laos for the 4th time.

I climbed to the top of a hill at the centre of Luang Prabang to check out the temples and Buddha's footprint....yes really there was a massive footprint in a cave and they are convinced it was made by Buddha, but I have to say I was not as convinced.But I was glad I did the climb because the views across the valley were beautiful.



I also enjoyed chatting to the local monks who are eager to improve their English.




And of course after the decent I needed to chill out by the edge of the Mekong with a glass of wine and a book.



It was good to stop rushing around for a while and just to take stock of where I had already been and what I had achieved so far on my trip.

STILL ALIVE AND KICKING

This is just a quick addition to the blog because so many of you have been messaging me concerned that I have not added to the blog. Well the reason is that the computers here in Vietnam have not been letting me add pages. This one has, but it will not let me upload pictures. So I will update it when I have a better computer. Since Laos I have travelled to Hanoi in Vietnam, it was the coldest it has been for over 40 yeras and I froze to death and got soaked through a couple of times on various trips. But there were good times on the trip to the Perfume Pagoda and Halong bay. I will put the info on those on another blog.
Then I travelled by overnight train to Hui and that was one of the worste journeys of my life (nothing like the wonderful train journey to Chang Mai when you got a private bunk) This time a whole family literally camped out on the bottom bunks!!! There was not space and certainly no privacy they even got round to stealing from my bag!!!!
But It is all part of the experience of the trip. I can tell myself that now, but it has really got to me at times and this country is so hard to travel in. They just lie to you about what it costs, or where you are going, or what time you will leave or get to places.You feel you are being conned all the time and they are so rude to tourists. I think they are just getting greedy and forgetting to be nice. Then I did a twelve hour bus trip yesterday to Nha Trang and that was hiddious. It was an old ricketty bus that stopped to tow another bus enroute!! But we got here late last night. It was there New Years Eve, so lots of fireworks and celebrations. I on the otherhand was not celebrating when I discovered that my room was full of fleas and my bed was just crawling. They moved my room and the other one was also infested. But I was so tired I went to bed. Today I got up early. They pipe music through public speakers very early in the morning to wake everyone up!!! all over Vietnam!!. I went for a long walk along the beach and it is beautiful. The sea was a silvery grey with the mountains in the background. And I chilled a bit. I have found a nice swimming pool along the beach . So I am now going to grab my things and have a lazy day there.
I will then be heading for Ho Chi Minh city in a couple of days.Then I will leave this country and head for Bangkok ready to fly out to Sydney on February the 20th(Horray!!!!).
I can honestly say I will never be coming back to this country again.But I would revisit all the other places I have been so far.

MEKONG BOAT DAY TWO

We were put on a far smaller boat with even more passengers.

It was leaning very heavily to one side for a few hours. When the water got very choppy in one part of the trip the men at the front looked concerned and moved lots of bags and rucksacks to the other side and it balanced out. But if that was not enough we stopped along the way and got another load of passengers.
We also pulled alongside the riverbank to drop people off to go to their villages in the middle of nowhere. It all added to the fascination of the journey.
The children and locals also took the opportunity to try and sell things from the rocks to passengers on the boat.



Again it was pretty dangerous, the way they leant into the boat from the rocks. But they seemed oblivious of the dangers and they were so smiley.
There was a real mixture of tourists on the boat which just added to the atmosphere. Young and old from all over the world just mixed and chatted and it was lovely to see how everyone was so good natured.
This leg of the trip took eight hours, and again the views from the boat were breathtakingly beautiful. I am so glad that I decided to do this trip! I have never seen such an impressive sunset as the one I witnessed over the Mekong as we made our way along the river to Luang Prabang.

Although you are sitting around on the boat for eight hours ,it is very wearing being in such cramped conditions for so long and I was glad when we eventually arrived at Luang Prabang eight ours later, just after the sunset..

MEKONG BOAT DAY ONE

The boat made its way along the Mekong river for seven hours. The views along the way were truely incredible. Some parts of the river were very choppy and my heart was in my mouth at times. There was a bar on board the boat so we got a few beers and read our books and the time passed. We arrived at Pack Bang around five thirty in the evening

and sure enough the locals were waiting by the riverside. Again there was lots of frenzied activity as they tried to secure a thin wooden plank for us to file off the boat. I do not know why they have to use such thin ones!!!


everytime I have to get off I just start to wobble and worry that I will fall in. Some people do fall in, but thank goodness I have managed, by the skin of my teeth to stay upright.

And I was really glad that we had the pep talk about the bags. They really do just jump onto the boat and start grabbing bags. Thankfully Don, the Canadian guy, spotted mine and shouted for me to grab it. There was also a very scary local man weilding a hacksaw at the teenagers as they tried to grab bags and shouting at them. So that was a bit of a deterrent. But they returned to chance their luck again.

It was quite scary just getting to the truck to be taken to our guesthouse. We had paid a fella at the border for a guesthouse when we got here. But in the chaos none of us took the name. We assumed we would be met. So we just followed a guy and hoped for the best. Thankfully he showed us to our rooms. We were given tourches because the electricity goes off around nine.There was no hot water. But we did get given large flasks with hot water so that we could have a washdown.

It is a very underdeveloped place, with the locals living very primitavely alongside the guesthouses that are springing up. After we settled into our rooms we headed to a local indian restaurant and had a good meal before going to bed.
Very early the next morning we were woken by a cockerill!!!!

The guesthouse owner says that local people use the early morning call of the Cockerill like a clock. They know that it is around half past five. So they get up, prepare the rice, then go to work. We on the otherhand could have wrung its kneck!!!
After breakfast we headed off to the boat for another lazy day sailing down the Mekong river.

SLOW MEKONG BOAT

I left Chang Mai in Northern Thailand and headed for Loas. First I had to take an eight hour bus journey to Huay Xai on the border of Thailand and Loas. It was very cramped but at least it was a fairly new bus. I got chatting to a few people including a lovely couple from Perth called Penny and Tony, so the journey passed quickly.


We were booked into a guesthouse overlooking the Mekong river. I was blown away by the view and it was nothing compared to the scenery I was going to experience along the slow boat journey over the next two days. They took our passports and said that they would sort the visas. No one really understood what was going on but we all just handed over the forms and passports.
Then we were given a meal and room for the night. Next day after breakfast we were given our packed lunches (spring rolls) then taken on buses to the riverside. Where we waited for ages to get our passports handed back with a Thai stamp. We then went onto longboats to be taken across the river.


Where we again had to fill in lots of forms and wait for ages to get our passports stamped by the Laos authorities and hand over thirty five dollars for the visa. They took small groups of us by taxi trucks to another cafe to hang around for another hour until everyone had been sorted. It was organised chaos.But it seemed to work. You just have to have faith that they do this everyday with lots of tourists and it works. I stocked up on plenty of water and of course a cushion! I had been told that you sit on hard wooden benches for eight hours.
It was a mad scramble to get a place on the boat and we were really packed in like sardines.But everyone was good natured so it was ok.
I sat near Penny and Tony from Perth and Dom and Norma from Canada sat further back.

I was lucky enough to get a bench to myself so I could sit lengthways which was a bonus!


Just before we set off we were given a pep talk by a local guy telling us when we get to the night stop the locals just make a grab for our rucksacks and bags and some go missing so we must take care!!! We thought it was funny.
Along the way we stopped at the rivers edge and lots of little children jumped onto the boat to sell us food and water. They seemed oblivious to the dangers of clambering down over the rocks. And they were very good persisstant sales people when they got on the boat.

TREKKING DAY TWO

I stayed up with the French and Spanish people until two in the morning getting quite drunk and singing songs around the campfire. It seemed like a good idea at the time! When we went to bed in the hut we all got a fit of the giggles and we just could not stop laughing for ages and some of the Japanese tourists who went to bed a lot earlier were not very amused with our infantile behaviour. And I am not proud to say it just made us all laugh even more and the Japanese man shouted at us to get out of the hut. We eventually settled down to sleep.It was really cold during the night, the temperature drops a lot. The next morning I got up at six thirty to see the sun rise. The Japanese man was by the campfire, which had been rebuilt by one of the villagers for us to wake up to. He was quite chatty so I just acted as if I was not associated with all the giggling the night before, I think I got away with it!! The guides made us a great breakfast of eggs, toast fruit and lots of tea and coffee. The sanitary facilities were limited but we all managed to clean our teeth and use the revoulting toilet.
We then said goodbye to the rest of the group who were doing a three day trekk and myself and two Swedish girls, headed off with a guide to walk two and a half hours to another waterfall.
It was a steep climb up the mountain side and down the otherside. I got quite scared on some sections of it.The path was less than two foot wide, with a sheer drop on one side. I just told myself not to look down. But I did have to hang onto the guide at one point because I froze with fear. Thankfully the Swedish girls were very patient. They were also a bit nervous. Eventually we reached the most amazing waterfall amongst the trees and this time we paddled in it.



We then walked to the Mae Mud village and the Shan tribe and we had lunch there.



We then got a truck ride to the Mae Wang stream to go bamboo rafting. We got soaked but it was fun



After that we headed for the elephant rides. I was in two minds all day about whether to do the ride or not. But I was assured they were kept in good conditions and the ride was out in the mountainside.So I agreed to do it. I wish I had followed my intuition. I am smiling here because this was taken at the start of the ride.

But by the end I was literally in tears. It was horrible. The animals were just treated so badly. They took us round this preset route for an hour. And once you start on it there is no going back .So I was stuck on this elephant. Frightened to death I might add, as it was very high up and I just did not feel secure. The poor animal had to negotiate very steep hills along narrow paths and it all felt so wrong. I will never ride an elephant again. When I go to Laos I am going to see if there are any elephant sanctuary,s that I can go to to help out to make up for the fact I fell for the tourist publicity and went on the ride.
But saying that the two day trekk on the whole was great. Ever muscle in my body ached and I was glad that I was not doing the three day trekk when I got back to my hotel.