Adios Laos

Back in Bangkok, and doesn’t it look a bit seedy now after the colonial style of Luang Prabang! This CavTours (LampenHols Subdivision) mini-break consisted of four nights in the Jade Hotel, a very reasonably priced, modern hotel just 15 minutes from the town centre (less if you cut across the Laotian Mall in the adjoining field (think bunch of trading tents strung together). You did have to put up with the early morning clatter and jabber from the family who ran the next door Laundromat (think Chinese laundry with lots of washing lines out back next to the vegetable plot). And the local teenagers’ bar the other side (that we crashed the other night - boy were we looked at!) plays its music loud until well past my bed time (around 9 o’clock these days). Still, the staff were very friendly and fell over themselves to help us.

That left us with three whole days to play with. For the record (and my failing memory):

Day 1: Elephant ride and jungle “trek” (Ha! Our knees are still knackered after that).

Day 2: Tour of LP. We inspected every bar and restaurant up the Mekong side, then every bar and restaurant down the Khan side, and then for good measure, every bar and restaurant down the centre main street. See, easy town to navigate: can’t get lost! Oh yes, for the culturally minded, we also visited all the ancient Wats and temples we came across and took lots of interesting photos to bore other people with if they dare drop by the house this year. To celebrate our success, we decided to pub crawl all the happy hours we’d found. Which was a stupid idea really as any homespun café on the river would get you a pint of 5% BeerLao for 10,000 Laos kip which, according to the internet, (and you’ll appreciate this guys!) equals exactly 73p. However, as wine is so expensive in Thailand the girls decided to see what other bargains they could find . . .

Day 3: Visit the temple at Phu Si on the only hill in the centre of town. We left this ‘til last as it involved climbing 238 sodding steps. By the time I was half way I was breathing like an arthritic steam engine but the view at the top was worth it. After that it was chill out day; reading a book by the Mekong River while the sun sets over the distant mountains is good for the soul, I’ve discovered.

All in all, I’d recommend this as a definite stopover if any of you are thinking of exploring this part of the world. I wish we’d planned for a week in hindsight. The flights aren’t cheap but the hotel was. It would be no trouble to use LP as a base camp and take a couple of overnight tours to other parts of Northern Laos or down the Mekong on a boat. Handling currency is a bit weird; basically they take kip for the small stuff like food and drink, Thai Baht for the medium stuff like shopping and trips, and US$ for the heavy stuff like visas and hotel costs so you have to juggle three or four conversions to GB£ if you really want to know what your paying for. There’s plenty more to recount about the place but this post is getting overlong again and wouldn’t want to trigger another wave of narcolepsy across the UK. Suffice to say, we were surprisingly sad to be leaving.