Luang Prabang, Laos
This province in northern Laos, not only lies close to the Mekong and Nam Khan rivers, it also is our destination for the Thai visa renewal of “la gringa”. Luang Prabang is here.
How easy is to get there?
Fortunately super easy, you pay visa on arrival, weird thing: Americans pay a little more than Mexicans. We got our tickets, flew to Laos in a super old plane and within an hour, we arrived to Luang Prabang. The town is so little that we decided to walk from the airport to our hotel… well actually to find a hotel, we came without booking any.
On our way to the city we saw many many temples, a factory that actually doesn’t look like a factory but more as an embassy, a cemetery, tons of people biking, specially kids in the road. After the main University we found a crazy bridge where the pedestrians pass is not open to pedestrians so you share it with the motorcycles, so cool.
Well, we technically needed to just land and comeback to Thailand but instead we spend the weekend on a bike tour plus a Kayak trip on the Mekong river, we visited the paper village, Alex survived to her 15 miles MTB ride, awesome job! Our guide was a little crazy so it made it easy to stop and see curious and crazy things for us.
One of the cool stops was the Whisky Village, where the name honors the product. Yes, rice whisky, some of them curated with snakes, scorpions, elephant penis, just to mention a few. We obviously got illustrated by the destination process and made some QA on the final product.
We finally arrived to the elephant camp, we of course we didn’t ride the elephants, we got super and well deserved local food that brought our energies back and ready for our next kayak adventure on the Mekong river where we worked as a team, I mean, I let Alex do the hard work and I focused on paddling. She got really cools pictures, like the green snake in the stone.
At some point we saw a lot of boats close to a big cave, our curiosity wasn’t included as part of the tour but it was just matter of stopping and paw the fee, so we went to Buddha’s cave a.k.a. Pak Ou caves, the place is full with statues of Buddha all over the place, trying to cover every single corner and hole. It’s proven that it is the perfect place for tour guides to take a good nap.
How is the food? How is the coffee?
The food is good, but to be honest our first meal in Laos surprisingly was in a Mexican restaurant, but in general is quite similar to Thai food. The coffee on the other hand is good, but instead of having it in a fancy place, we went to this small local place that helped Alex and me to wake up completely, this coffee is made on the traditional way, next time you come, get one here (Pasaneyom).
A piglet ready for take away.
Kids at (outside) school. It doesn’t seem to have strict policies.
There are two cool waterfalls to visit in Luang Prabang, we decided to go to Tad Sae, this time without guide and a bad GPS signal. We drove a motorcycle for around 40 minutes, then we got a little lost but a Lady Boy working at a Gas station helped us and pointed us to take the last off-road kilometer, we got the a point where you need to park the bike and take a small boat to the falls.
This place is also an elephant camp and its so cool to watch people riding them on the clear and clean water. A lot of people arrive to the place but they stay on the entrance area, we hiked all the way back to the place where the main fall is, we pass some cool areas, some ants wanted to enjoy the ride with us but we didn’t agree, Alex found a natural swing and we both enjoyed the fresh water mostly alone.
Remember when the cliff was ‘closed’ in the Grand Canyon, well this time there was no excuse or many meters between she and the water so she did it!
