Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
We both had a pretty sleepless night in our room, as what at first seemed quaint about living in someone's house, soon became a massive minus point - Our room was just off the communal dining area and we could hear people noisily moving around all night and very early morning. I'm also sure someone spent a lot of the night strangling a cat outside our window.
We were up at 7 for our trip and headed to Joma bakery (quickly becoming my favourite place!) to pick up a takeaway breakfast of Foccacia BLT and fruit smoothie.
It's freezing here when the sun isnt out so it was really cold in the morning, and we had our usual 3 jumpers on and got on the slow boat to the Pak Ou caves. Robin was keen to get the boat as thought it would be much more enjoyable than a minibus - he soon regretted this when we spent 2.5 hours on uncomfortable little seats on a slow boat with cold wind blowing in our face while we motored up the river! By the time we got there he'd pulled his socks up over his trousers, had his towel over him like a grannie blanket and had put him swim shorts over my feet (I had flip flops on, was v cold!).
The caves were something of a disappointment, there were basically two caves full of hundreds of little budda ornaments (including a pink plastic one, which I suspect was not an ancient relic). However, our next stop was a pleasant surprise for both of us. We unexpectedly got off the boat at a little village to be greeted by a man giving us shots of Lao rice wine and Lao whiskey (50% proof) (=Robin happy), there were also women on looms weaving beautiful scarves of silk and wool which I bought a couple of (=Tina happy).
We then headed back to town to grab a baguette from one of the market stalls before heading off on the minibus to the Kouang Si waterfall, which was amazing. We walked up to the top of the waterfall which goes down in tiers to beautiful crystal blue pools which you can swim in. Despite the water being ice cold myself and Robin were of the few people that braved a swim (Robin in fact stayed in for about 15 mins as everyone watched and took photos) one girl told me how brave I was when I got out!
After this we took another detour to a little tiny village which was really poor and the houses were just little shacks. There were hundreds of children running around and when we got back in the van they started putting their hands through the windows asking for food (while our driver stood and watched!). At this point I realised I had some Ritz crackers in my bag (I always carry emergency food as I have a tendency to faint when I get hungry, however, in this case I felt I could give them up!). Instead of giving the pack to one child (they tend to run off with them) I handed them out one by one and the kids went mental, the van was literally swamped with them (Robin was convinced they were going to overturn the van!). After a lot of snatching and me trying to hand them out fairly the crackers we gone and were allowed to leave!
We were shattered when we got back so headed straight for dinner, another couple of red and green currys, v good. Then we walked back through the night market where we bought the obligatory Beer Lao tshirts and I got a traditional Lao skirt...which doesn't fit and I have to try and exchange later with broken English and Lao, will be interesting.
When we got back to the hotel there were lots of Laotian men having drinks outside our room so we spent the rest of the evening whispering as the door is more like a saloon door, and decided to check out the following morning!
- comments