Luang Prabang - the old capital of Laos -

Luang Prabang really was the jewel in the Laos crown. Peaceful (despite the thousands of tourists that come year upon year) and relaxing and home to some 500 monks. The town is scattered with Buddhist temples and lies along the Mekong river...in it's centre lies Mount Phoussi. The 6 hour minibus journey had it's high points and low points along the picturesque hills and valleys (with Vanessa asleep on one shoulder and a big German asleep on the other) and Luang Prabang was a welcome destination.

The monks really were the focal point here. Their bright orange robes contrasting amazingly against the white and grey backdrops of temple walls and houses. The main event was the daily giving of alms to the monks. Every morning, locals would line the pavements, kneeling with gifts of rice, flowers and sweets in their hands as a spectacular line of 500 monks would file past to except their gifts. As you can imagine this was a really amazing site and hence the camera went into overtime. However, we did try to remain respectful to the ceremony as the many posters around Luang Prabang had requested. We remained across the street and watched from afar...unfortunately, bus loads of European and Japanese tourists weren't always so discrete. Many of the monks were young and of high school age. Every buddhist in Laos ends up doing at least a year as a monk and many of them choose to combine this with high school and their studies. So as we walked around the temples the monks would come up and chat to us to practice their English.

One day we took a trip out to some waterfalls at the end of a very long and dusty dirt track road. Fortunately, we were in a mini bus but we passed plenty of people who chose to take a tuk tuk and arrived covered in dirt and pretty dishevelled (worse for them it was the same price!!). The waterfalls were fantastic. I (Andy) dived in and swam around in the beautiful blue-green water. The temperature wasn't so beautiful...but in the end it was so cold that you couldn't feel it so I coped ok! It was a great place and a great site to see...proving that Luang Prabang wasn't just temples and monks.

Vanessa's favourite part of Luang Prabang? - The Night Markets. To be fair they were very good. At 5pm each night locals and Laotians from surrounding villages would descend on the main street with baskets and boxes of handicrafts, textiles and beerlao t-shirts and lay out their goods on mats. The street was nicely lit up with individual lamps next to each street vendor. Here, we bought a few presents for friends in Oz and Vanessa invested in more scarves and fisherman's pants. Also here we found the cheapest food we'd had so far in Asia. Fit as much raw food on your plate as can and a woman cooks it for you there and then on the street in a big wok...all for about half a US dollar!

Other great things in Luang Prabang? A massage and steam room at the red cross massage...and chocolate croissants at a cafe called Joma's. Not so good? the visit to Pak Ou caves really isn't worth the 2 hour boat trip upstream where we nearly went overboard as our dodgy driver hit a rock....

Having travelled up ahead of them...we met up again with George and Tanya. One night with a few other friends (including Martin and Catherine - due in Sydney in March!) we went out to a place the other side of Mt Phoussi called LaoLao Barbeque. We had an awesome night with ten of us cooking our own food around a bbq dome with a soup troth around the side. We had a good laugh recounting tales of our travels and debating the best way to get to Chiang Mai. Was it to be the dreaded speed boat? the slow and uncomfortable slow boat or dodgy Laos airlines?

Well, unfortunately, Laos airlines was all booked up and we'd heard some horror stories of people being killed on the fast speed boat (as well as having experienced first hand seeing tourists pass us on a boat trip in a speed boat with crash helmets and virtually no room for any luggage), cramped and getting ripped off on the slow boat. Some interesting stories were recalled and harrowing details of people falling off and having to be picked up later were also found on the Internet.
So...eventually we decided to end our Laos experience with a flight back to Vientiane and a bus trip from there across the Friendship bridge and then upto Chiang Mai.

Laos was a fantastic country, not taken over by the tourist fever and the money grabbing mentality we'd seen in other areas of Asia. Luang Prabang was idyllic and Vang Vieng provided one of the best days of our trip so far.

Laos - Vientiane & Vang Vieng -

We left Cambodia on 15th Jan and flew into the Laos capital city, Vientiane. To be honest, its more of a large town than a small city. There's not a lot here apart from a replica Arc de Triomphe (made from concrete that the Americans gave the Lao's to build an airport runway) , and a golden stupah. Weirdly, there's also a top notch hair salon that Vanessa is in treating herself to permanently straightened hair as I write! Apparently (so she tells me) its a real bargain at $40 and would have set her back at least 300 pounds in London.

We stayed in a great cheap guest house called Phone Paseuth with the luxury of cable TV and a hot shower - ok a luxury we've been used to for a while now - which was close to the central water fountain. Here, there were some excellent restaurants offering 3 course French set menus for around $6. Apart from this and a good Scandinavian bakery Vientiane didn't have a great deal more to offer so we booked ourself a trip to Vang Vieng - on the recommendation of loads of other travellers...

We then took a 4 hour bus ride and spent a few days in and around Vang Vieng. It’s like a mini Kho San Road - lots of backpackers, bars showing western movies and re-runs of ‘Friends’. As well as tubing, Vang Vieng is famous for its ‘happy shakes’ and ‘happy pizzas’ or there’s the ‘Ecstatic shake’ if you feeling like getting, well, ecstatic I suppose. Our happy shake though was distinctly average and left us feeling, well, pretty much like we did before drinking it.

We stayed in a little bungalow next to the river and mountains. There was also a nice little balcony that we chilled out on as the sun went down. We came here with Tanya and George, a Canadian couple that we've been hanging out with for the last couple of days who've been a really good laugh. Amazingly have been with each other for 16 years and are travelling for 8 months around SE Asia.



We all went on a kayaking, trekking and tubing trip through caves, villages and down the river. We also got to do some rope swinging and cliff jumping over and into the river off these giant man-made swings. All along the river in Vang Vieng you can hear the intermittent cries of "BeerLao! BeerLao" as locals reach with long bamboo poles to pull you into their 'riverside bar' and to buy a Beer Lao. Yes, officially the best beer in Asia! It would have to be in our top 5 days away so far. The landscape was incredible, and this town instantly puts you in a chilled out kinda mood.

We did a another day on the river, this time tubing down the whole way which was cool; basically you sit in a giant inner tube and float down the river in the sun for four or five hours. The scenery is spectacular, limestone cliffs rising out of rice paddy fields. Again we went on the rope swings and zip lines...chilled out with a few beers and leisurely made our way down the 3.5km stretch of river. Travelling can't get much better than this.

Laos was a real breathe of fresh air from the rest of Asia - the people were some of the friendliest we've ever seen, and unlike Thailand and Cambodia, weren't doing a real hard sell on you. Although its a pretty poor country, the Laotians don't seem to beg a lot either. Next it was to the old capital of Laos and a 6 hour minibus ride to Luang Prabang.

The spectacular Angkor Wat -

A few days later we got on another bus up north to Siem Reap, the home of the world's most amazing ruins, the ancient Angkor Kingdom. We managed to get our lazy arses out of bed (for only the second time in 3 and a half months) at 5 am to watch the sunrise behind the main Angkor Wat Temple.

The view was stunning. The temple rises out of the pitch black of night into the early morning light like something out of Indiana Jones. Of course your sitting their watching the sunrise with about 300 other gaping travellers, so maybe Indiana may have been feeling a little claustrophobic at this point. But - even allowing for the busloads of Japanese tourists- Angkor has to be the most amazing thing we've seen on our trip. I would have to say that it even beats the Egyptian Pyramids and the Taj Mahal.

We also saw the Bayon Temple here which has 208 massive stone faces carved into its walls. Siem Reap had the same peaceful feel to it that Phnom Penh did...which some people might find strange for it to be described like that when the square around the market was being completely dug up and there are of course plenty of tourists, but again it was the indescribable feel of the place that made it hard to leave.

Ta Prohm was another fascinating, almost unbelievable sight. The age of the ruins and the abandonment of them from about the 13th Century onwards has led to them being engulfed by jungle until the French started to uncover them again. Here at Ta Prohm the roots of trees had completely grown over the top of some of the walls. If you want to see more pics of these you're probably better off watching Tomb Raider which was filmed here.

New Year's in Cambodia -

We took a mini bus over the Thai/Cambodian border, overpaid for visa's to some corrupt Cambodian officials, sat in a small bar listening to 60+year old guys bragging about their early 20's Thai girlfriends (errgghh!) before a final 4 hour roof-top boat ride along the Cambodian coast to reach the beach side town of Sihanoukville.

We spent New Years on the beach knocking back $1 pina coladas at a cool little beach shack bar, before having a bit of a dance at another shack a bit further along the beach. My first New Year (Andy) in the heat..and it was good! Although, still can't beat a house party and Inferno's in London! ;-)

After the hospital disaster at Xmas the sun n sand was exactly what we needed, so 4 nights turned into 2 weeks before we could manage to tear ourselves away from the beach. All over the beaches were kids selling bracelets, braids or collecting plastic bottles and cans. It was tough to see but at the same time they were really friendly and seemed happy enough, but they did have to work hard. We also visited a cafe here that helped raise money for those effected by the poverty in the area...it seemed that there were projects to help in place but I guess not nearly enough. So we bought a few things off the kids and tried to eat at the cafe as often as possible.

We stayed in a couple of places in Sihanoukville including a 5 star resort for 5 nights. Yep, we pushed the boat out and it was well worth it as the private white sand beach was so beautiful and peaceful. Of course it's made it hard to go back to being a skummy backpacker again, but oh well.

From Sihanoukville we took a 4 hour bus trip up to the Cambodian capital city Phnom Penh. The most famous (or infamous) tourist sites are the Choeung Ek Killing Fields and Toul Sleng Prison. Choeung Ek is a series of exhumed mass graves, with a stupa at its center filled with the skulls of hundreds of men, women and children. Toul Sleng is the former high school the Khmer Rouge converted into a torture center where around 14,000 people were prepared for their deaths with electric shocks and other atrocities such as having their heads locked inside boxes of scorpions. The victims' photos line the walls, although the skull map of Cambodia has now been removed.

Both sites were pretty overwhelming and depressing, but important to see to understand the brutality of the 1975-79 Khmer Rouge regime's rule and understand why Cambodia is still struggling to come to terms with this past while the former leaders live out their old ages in peace and at large.

As a result the miltary still seems to be pretty corrupt which luckily for me (Andy) I was able to get to a shooting range where you could choose guns from a menu and test fire them against a target. I was just curious... Still 5 of my 7 with a czechoslovakian 9mm hit close to the centre of the target so I was pretty chuffed!

Despite the torrid past that they've had to endure, its been great to meet all of the Cambodians and to see that their lives now are better (a long way off perfect by all means) and that they have freedom, but unfortunately, very little money. In fact a school teacher or doctor is unlikely to earn over 20 US$ a month.

And for a capital city who's history is so rooted in misery, Phnom Penh is suprisingly characteristic. It still has alot of colonial charm left over from the Frenchies. We spent our evenings in the many riverside bars, great for watching the Mekong flow by, as well as whole families whizz past on just one motorcycle.

We also did a Cambodian cooking class here which was fantastic. First of all we were taken round the Phnom Penh food markets where we saw amazing colours of limes, chillis, watermelons as well as lots of fish, dried, smoked, live, almost alive and some that could have been dead for quite a while! We arrived at a dutchman's house (Fritz) where we each had our own cooking station. We kicked off with papaya salad and then made great 'sausages' - with chicken and pork wrapped in a banana flower and then fried in batter. They were delicious!

For mains we made Fish Amok a traditional cambodian dish which involved steaming sliced fish in a red curry sauce inside a banana leaf pinned together with cocktail sticks. The lady that took the course had had a really tough life and almost died during the Pol Pot regime but had still managed to raise 4 of her 5 children and get them through school and now into Uni - sadly, she had to give up her last son for adoption to a french couple as he had a bad heart condition. She was so friendly and kind to us and is probably the nicest person we've met on our trip.

Finally, like each of the main capital city's we've visited so far...the Royal Palace of Phnom Penh was a spectacular building and complex. From here we made the trip upto Siem Reap and the next stunning site..to rival the Taj Mahal...Angkor Wat!