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Luang Prabang, Laos

Here's the problem with Chiang Mai, Thailand, in our opinion: It's just about perfect, and that doesn't make it any fun to write about. Chiang Mai is a modern city with all the western amenities, like Bangkok. It's also clean, cool and not crowded, not like Bangkok. It is also a great place to get the things you need before you venture into a country like Laos, which was our plan. Maybe it's because Chiang Mai is Thailand's prime minister's home town, but that city has everything. We got caught up on internet, did some shopping, and Andrea even took a cooking course, while I upheld my new habit of getting as many massages as possible. The price went way up to five bucks for an hour, but the stress of the higher price just made me need a massage.

Eventually we made plans to go to the city Luang Prabang, Laos, with a local travel agency. Since it takes a few days to get there if you don't fly, we got lazy and booked a package tour which involved transportation to the border, an overnight stay at a hotel, and booking on a boat for a two day trip down the Mekong river to Luang Prabang. Sounds romantic, but you already know where this one's going. I think maybe our brains had gotten soft from all that working in Mae Sot.

We were smart enough to ask what kind of transportation would be provided to the border, and even got to see pictures of the new, comfortable air conditioned vans and the hotel, as well as the boat we would be traveling on. We were also sure to note the scheduled departure and travel time, the van ride was eight hours during the day: So far, so good.

The van arrived in the morning and was actually like the one in the picture, a full sized, air conditioned van with seating for 10. Once again, the Thais pleasantly surprised us with actually only putting 10 people in the van. The passengers were all western travelers, from the three testosterone fueled Israeli college kids, to the 60 year old drunk German guy sitting next to Andrea. At least the college guys were in the back and we could put headphones on, but we had to be careful not to make a spark near the German guy's breath so the van wouldn't explode.

The ride to the border of Laos wasn't all that unpleasant, actually, at least not compared to what we've been through, especially since the road was actually paved the entire way. It was when we arrived at our hotel when things took an all too familiar turn for the worse. To give you the most vivid mental image, we will do our best to describe it to you:

Imagine a cement box.

Well that pretty much describes it. It did, in fairness, have a door. The room also had a bathroom, but that might be stretching it a little. It was more like a stall, with walls that only went a few feet up. This can be a bit of an inconvenience for those of us over six feet tall, as there are still a very few things that Andrea and I do not like to share although on this trip that seems to be rapidly disappearing. Imagine your bedroom if it had never been cleaned, but much smaller and cement, with a toilet in it behind a few blocks of cement going about up to your chest. The bed might be described as extremely firm, perhaps radically so, maybe best for those who have recently been transferred from a hospital gurney or a pile of bricks. We're pretty sure the sheets had been washed once, but only because of how old they looked. After we each took polite little walks around the building to allow for a modicum of privacy, we decided to sleep in our clothes.

It wasn't until the next morning that we realized our hotel did have one asset, it was right on the edge of the Mekong river, and we watched the day begin with a spectacular sunrise over the town of Huay Xai, Laos, just a couple of hundred meters away. After breakfast we were shuttled to the border crossing where we went through the requisite forms signing/passport stamping procedure with about 50 other westerners who had arrived for their own personal unique experience of a two day boat trip down the Mekong just like everybody else.

Eventually we were all herded onto our boat, a long, narrow ferry about 50 feet long, with very hard wooden benches to sit on. It bears mentioning only because at the end of two days it's one of the only things we could think about, and it wasn't just us. One couple, having somehow been warned of this little detail, had bought a crib-sized baby mattress to sit on which had probably cost them about three dollars. By the end of the first day they weren't even entertaining offers of fifty. These boats seemed to be the only type of large vessel on the Mekong, probably because it draws so little water which is necessary for the shallow river, especially from January to May. Besides the slowly increasing numbness throughout our backsides, the boat ride down the Mekong was even more scenic than had been described to us. We spent hours staring at the beautifully unpopulated landscape as we slipped by, save for a few villages of five or ten houses every once in a while. It's hard to imagine we could spend so much time on a river so large and see so little civilization. The villages we did pass seemed lost in time, what the river provided being their main source of sustenance. With the water level low, people had planted their crops below the high water mark with thatched huts far perched on the banks above. In village after village as we passed, people were working in and among the water, washing, fishing, cleaning, and playing, often stopping to wave as the boat motored by, as if we were the only boat that had passed in months.

As the first day came to an end, we stopped at the town of Pak Beng, the largest town in the area, it's prosperity almost certainly because it lies about half way between Huay Xai and Luang Prabang, our destination. With the river not being navigable at night, it is literally the only place to stop a large boat without beaching it. Clearly, the town was prepared for the boat of tourists that comes through almost daily, as a small group of touts assembled on the shoreline with descriptions of why their guesthouses were better than the few others in town. It doesn't seem like much of a mathematical stretch to know that there is exactly 50 people coming down stream every day, and it didn't seem like any of us had a lot of choice in the matter, but it seemed pretty important to them, and eventually everyone found a place to stay. We found a room at one of the newer guest houses, which was nice enough despite the fact that the room was in the shape of a trapezoid which kept us bumping into the walls every time we got up. 

Although Pak Beng is well inside Laos' borders, it had a decidedly "border town" feel to it. The gentleman in front of our guesthouse who took me halfway down an alley before quietly asking what I was looking for was clearly disappointed when I told him all I wanted was toilet paper. It became a little clearer when we heard the same guy negotiating with the Israeli kids over how young they wanted their prostitutes as they shouted down from the balcony outside our room. Despite this, we actually found a nice restaurant for dinner recently opened by young couple who had just gotten married. Restaurant, in this case, means some tables on dirt underneath a thatched ceiling, but it really was very pleasant, the young man loved to practice his English and his wife's cooking was quite good.

Our second day on the ride to Luang Prabang was much like the first, and we watched the villages on the banks of the Mekong become slightly more frequent as we neared Laos' second largest city, although they didn't seem to become any more modern. In two days on the river we hadn't passed under a single bridge. Our boat pulled up to the pier in Luang Prabang late in the afternoon, and with the help of several local touts we were able to find a room for the night as dusk fell, making our first views of the city even that more impressive.

The city of Luang Prabang rests on a peninsula where two rivers join. It's incredibly scenic, it's French colonial architecture having been mercifully preserved by UNESCO's naming it a World Heritage Site years ago. It has a wonderfully laid back atmosphere partly because of this, and partly because pretty much the whole country of Laos has a wonderfully laid back atmosphere. Nobody seems to get too stressed about anything. By law, everything closes at 11:00pm, so there's no blaring music or drunken foreigners stumbling about the streets late at night like in so many of the other touristed cities we've visited. In the evening, the main street closes down and locals lay down blankets on the road to display their handicrafts, transforming the whole area into a night market. Andrea and I can tell we really like a town when we're walking around and we find ourselves pointing at buildings that would make a nice guest house for us to start. On the list of places we'd actually do it, Luang Prabang is on the short list.

We discovered early on that massages were about three dollars in Luang Prabang which made the town even better, prompting me to begin to refer to all expenses in massages for reference. For instance, a ham and cheese baguette sandwich cost about one massage, a motor scooter rental about two, and our guesthouse a stunning five massages a day. Andrea thought it was funny until I would stand over her shoulder as she shopped saying things like, "You know that pillow cover is going to cost TWO massages, don't you?" She had had enough by the time I told a vendor that a massage and a half was the most I was willing to pay for something before stepping on my foot, prompting me, of course, to need a massage.

So Luang Prabang was its own little slice of paradise, but being compulsive types we eventually got anxious laying around in such a perfect town and yearned once again for the bad food, hard seats and long rides we've become so accustomed to. The next morning we packed our bags and headed down to the docks to catch a boat north and try to see what the rest of the country was like.

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