We left Sapa the same way we arrived, on an overnight train. This time we arrived into Hanoi at 5:30am, and had booked a flight straight out again to Luang Prabang in Laos. We’d had a great time in Vietnam, and probably stayed longer than we’d originally intended, as we had nearly run out of days on our 15-day visa exemption!
Luang Prabang is well known for a few things, the Kuang Si waterfalls were on our hitlist and we knew that it had an incredible density of buddhist temples and that watching the monks collecting alms at dawn from the local people is considered a tourist attraction in it’s own right. We didn’t know a whole lot else of what to expect there.
On our travel day we arrived late afternoon, got checked into our guest house and decided to take a walk along the Mekong river into the main tourist area of town. We were treated to some great views as the sun went down, the light over the water was a photographers dream, and even us amateurs managed to get a nice photo or two! We quickly formed a good impression of this town, perhaps it was the calming vibe of the many temples, but it certainly seemed like a slower pace of life here!
The next day we arranged transport up to the Kuang Si falls. We paid the entrance fee, which included a walk through a bear sanctuary where a number of bears are kept which have been rescued from poachers traps. Cute photos galore, especially of the cubs who displayed the tenacity of youth insisting on being playful while the adults more sensibly napped in the heat of the day.
We carried on, and arrived at the falls, where bright cyan water (something about calcium deposits from the limestone gives it the colour?) cascades over shelves of rock. It’s incredibly spectacular and was definitely a tourist trap, selfie sticks galore! Some tourists were already swimming in the designated areas, but we elected to take the steep 45 minute hike to the top of the falls first, which was challenging in our flip-flops! The views from the top were good, but slightly disappointed that we couldn’t see the falls from there, the best view of those was definitely at the bottom!
Back down again and we now felt like we deserved a swim. Great fun playing in the currents from the pools and cooling off.
The following day we booked onto a cooking course for the evening, but had the day to ourselves. After a relaxed start we wandered down to the office of the botanical gardens. The entrance fee included a 15 minute boat ride to get you to (and later back from) the gardens themselves, which was good fun in it’s own right, especially as we seemed to have picked a quiet time to visit, and were the only ones on the boat. We quickly realised as we arrived, that not only had we been the only ones on the boat, but we were very nearly the only people in the whole place! This made our trip super relaxing, and we enjoyed a stroll around the gardens, reading the information about the different traditional Laotian medicinal uses for the plants, the 180 different species from the ginger family(!) and viewing the palm and bamboo collections, both of which there were far more varieties than I had previously thought. We also followed their signs to a cave which was a 45 minute walk along the side of a limestone cliff, which had it not been in an environmentally protected area, would have made for some superb climbing! The cave itself was fairly large, and had a small buddhist shrine inside and was definitely worth the walk.
Once back from our walk to the cave, we treated ourselves to lunch in the cafe. It was (like everything else here) completely deserted and we had the place to ourselves. It was in a lovely situation, right next to a lily pond and we chose what we considered the best table in the place, and had some very tasty food, I particularly enjoyed their take on a Laotian traditional mekong fish ‘Laap’ salad to which they had added pomelo fruit. Fantastic combination of flavours!
We hopped back on the boat to take us back to Luang Prabang and headed over to our cooking class. That was fun too, the two instructors demonstrated cooking 4 different dishes which we got to taste, and then we picked two of those dishes to cook for ourselves. Mel and I chose a chicken laap salad to make, and a red curry with chicken and pork. We were provided with recipe books which we worked from (thankfully we didn’t have to remember the steps the demo had shown us!) and we ended the evening enjoying eating our creations (one very successful laap and a slightly dry curry which we let simmer down for too long, oops!), and chatting to the other cooking students. Our fellow students were one couple from Essex, and a French couple from Paris who didn’t speak much English. We ended the night drinking beers and swapping travel stories with our newfound friends from Essex.
It felt like not enough time in Luang Prabang but the next morning we would hit the road once more, or rather the river, as we would be taking the slow boat up the Mekong to Huay Xai and then crossing the border in Thailand and taking a bus to Chiang Mai. The only thing we had booked was the boat ticket (and the advice we had read online had said we didn’t even need to do that!) so we were looking forward to ‘winging it’ a bit and the 3 day journey would be quite the adventure in itself!
Melanie and Colin Go Travelling 