Laos! The Director's Cut (Part I)

So, after 2 buses and nine hours of travelling, I made it to the Chiang Khong ferry crossing and arrived in Laos before my Thai visa expired (yay!). To get from Huay Xai (the town on the Laos side of the border) to Luang Prabang there are two options:

1) the slow boat: 15 hours over two days, with an overnight stay at Pakbeng. By all reports, gorgeous scenery, but the ferries are usually seriously overcrowded and the bare wooden benches soon lose their novelty value.

2) the fast boat: 6 hours straight to Luang Prabang in a speed boat. Certainly faster, but the boats are cramped and really noisy and at least once a week one capsizes (not great when you have all your belongings with you). They issue all passengers with helmets and life jackets but there are still 7 fatalities each year (so I've heard).

Not suprisingly, I went for option number 1: the slow boat. Good choice. Despite all I'd heard, it was really comfortable. Half boat had the expected benches but the other half had awesome coach-style reclining padded seats. I got to the dock early both days and secured one of the really cushy seats, which made it so much easier to chill out, alternating between reading my book and watching kids on the side of the river waving at the boat and showing off doing backflips into the water.

I stayed in Luang Prabang for about a week - like everyone else there, I kept on getting up in the morning and thinking "just one more day, then I'll move on". It has this strange magnetic power that traps you and keeps you there. Very difficult to escape. Like a black hole, but more fun. It's a really pretty town on the river and there's a great nightlife, if you know where to find it. Officially in Laos, all the bars close promptly at eleven-thirty. Unofficially, there seems to be some sort of system (probably involving the exchange of large wads of cash) where a particularly bar can stay open without the cops worrying about it until around 2.30 am when they come and chuck everyone out. When I arrived in Luang Prabang it was the Vietnam Bar, a grimy little bar with character and cheap beer. Although not in any of the guidebooks, somehow everyone know about it and its somewhat flexible opening hours. Get there at 11.28 and the place is deserted; turn up at 11.35 and it is absolutely packed and you're lucky to get a seat. I made heaps of friends there and ran into heaps of old friends, mainly people I first met in Pai in Thailand.

When I wasn't drinking Beer Lao, I actually got out and did some sightseeing, checking out temples and waterfalls around the town. At one of the temples I met a Laos monk who had been studying English for a couple of years and was keen to practice on a native speaker (or at least that's what I thought he was keen for). Over the next couple of days I went to the temple and spent a few hours chatting with him and helping him and some other monks out with their studies, sitting on the floor of a temple in front of a beautiful golden Buddha. On the third day we were chatting in a more secluded corner of one the temples. When I went to say goodbye, he leant in and kissed me (and I mean properly kissed me, not just a peck on the cheek) ... and I kissed him back. And then I thought "what the hell am I doing?" and left. Everything I have read about Buddhist monks has said that any sort of physical contact with women is forbidden - when passing something to a monk, a women is supposed to put it down on a table so the monk can pick it up without any chance of physical contact. I felt like I was corrupting this guy who had been living in a monastery as a novice/monk since he was 8 years old. But I can't really blame myself: he certainly wanted to be corrupted. I think he was having a bit of trouble with the "controlling your passions" part of Buddhism!

In Luang Prabang I met a lovely British guy, Chris, and decided to to travel with him and a Finnish girl, Antouch (who I had originally met in Pai), north to Nong Khiaw. We caught a little boat up the river through absolutely spectacular scenery: the river is lined with towering limestone karsts rising out of verdant forest. Definitely the most beautiful scenery that I saw in Laos.

After seven hours, we reached Nong Khiaw, a tiny one street town on the river. It is surrounded by the same scenery that we saw on the boat, wedged between huge craggy cliffs and forest. It looked all the more amazing in the mornings when the clouds were low over the nountains and mist descended over the river.

The town's only real drawcard, apart from the vistas from the balcony of the bungalows along the river, is a couple of caves a few kilometres away that were used by the locals as a hideout during the American War (Vietnam War). Americans dropped over 2 billion tons of bombs on Laos between 1964 and 1973, up to a third of which failed to explode and still litter the countryside. Around ten thousand people have been maimed or killed by the unexploded ordnance since the war. There wasn't much to see in the caves themselves, except for a couple of bomb craters just outside (now water holes where locals go fishing) as there barely anything left that showed that people had been living there but it gave an impression of the conditions they were subjected to.

While we were walking from the first to the second set of caves, being lead by some kids across a paddy field and along a small stream, squelching and slipping through the mud, we were attacked by leeches. I luckily only got a couple on my feet - Antouch and Chris had at least ten of the little suckers each. We decided to forego the second cave and backtrack to somewhere slightly drier to get them all off (they don't really bother me but Antouch had never experienced leeches before and was not very happy about them). We started on the 4 kilometre walk back to town and was about 10 minutes in when I saw a patch of blood soaking through my trousers, just above my knee. I couldn't feel the leech anywhere, but I knew it must be around somewhere. Then another patch of blood appeared on the back of my knee, and another bloomed on the opposite leg, and another on my thigh. Closer inspection revealed the enormous bloated leech, engorged with my blood, on my upper thigh. It left six bites on me, all of which didn't stop bleeding profusely til hours and hours later. I still have scars on my legs now, over three weeks later.

After dealing with the leech, we had just resumed our walk back into town when we saw a wall of water heading towards us, across the valley and along the road - a tropical downpour. I have never experienced rain like that in my life - it was like being hosed down. I had an umbrella, which kept my head and shoulders dry for a while but after ten minutes it was so saturated that water was dripping through the umbrella so I gave in and got absolutely soaked. It was actually quite fun and by the time we got back to our bungalows we couldn't have been wetter if we had jumped into the river.