Laos - Luang Prabang

From Chang Rai, I travelled North to Chang Kong on the Laos border. After just one night there, I crossed the Mekong River into Laos and boarded the 2 day slow boat travelling to Luang Prabang.

Unfortunately, I've lost the pictures from the boat and from Chang Kong, including one of an elephant being transported down the river and one of Carolina being attacked by a monkey in Luang Prabang (Dave had to spank the monkey to get rid of it)…but without photographic evidence who’ll believe me?!

This is the museum in Luang Prabang, which was the King and Queen's residence up until they were outsted in the 1970’s. We couldn’t bring in any bags or cameras and had to take off our shoes going in.






The Temple on the grounds of the museum.

Sittong on the steps of the temple on the grounds of the museum – Dave (Clare), Carolina (Sweden), Neil (Burmingham) and “Macca” (Clare).

From Luang Prabamg, we took a tour of the nearby waterfalls. Near the waterfalls were a few bears and a tiger that had been saved from poachers. The bears seemed happy enough but, despite having a relatively big cage, the tiger just walked up and down the same 20 foot path.

Ed, Anna and Gemma on the way up the hill in the centre of Luang Prabang.

Some of the guys swimming at the bottom of the waterfalls near Luang Prabang
The waterfalls were actually a set of abouta dozen falls of varied heights. This was one of the higher sections.

Sunset over the mountains and Mekong river near Luang Prabang

After a few days in Luang Prabang, I went to Vang Vieng to part-take in the noble art of tubing – floating down a river, in a tractor tube, beer in hand, stopping off in various “pubs” along the way to replenish the beer supply and zip along the numerous “flying fox” rides. Arguably, the best way to spend 4 or 5 hours. For this particular adventure, I was joined my Anna (England), Gemma (England) and Simon, Gerry, Jimmy, Neven and Merv (I think), all from Brisbane. A mighty time was had by all.


The "tubing" crew - Anna, Gemma, Merv, Simon, Neven, myself, Gerry and Jimmy.

From Luang Prabang, I traveled to Vientiane. I had planned to spend a few days there but there wasn’t much to do so I left Laos a couple of days early (13th Dec) on a plan to Hanoi in Vietnam. At the airport in Vientiane I met Christina (NZ), who turned out to be alright (who knew there were decent Kiwis out there?!) and we turned out to be travel buddies for over a week while in and around Hanoi.

In front of the Black Pagoda in Vietiane.

Vientiane's equivalent of the Arc De Triumph. Nice view from the top but you weren't allowed to take photos.

One of my better photographic efforts. I can't remember the proper name of this thing right now.

Chang Rai

The day after geting back from the trek, I headed north to Chang Rai. At the bus station I met Jes (NZ) and we hung around together for a couple of days. We hired a couple of 125cc motorbikes and explored the countryside around the city. Our first destination was this small waterfall about 19 Km from Chang Rai.





One of the guys running the guest house told of this 100 metre high hill that had a large golden Buddha right at the top and some great views...we eventually found it.

If this hill were anywhere in Ireland, there'd be GAA teams running/crawling up and down it everyday. It was a tough climb but the views were amazing, as promised. We could, supposedly, see the mountains of both Myanmar(Burma) and Laos. And yes, that is copious quantities of sweat oozing from my every pore, glistening in the late afternoon sun!

Chang Mai (contd)

When in Chang Mai, we decided to take a 2 day/1 night trek. It was a 2 hour ride in a truck to get to the elephant camp that was the starting point of the trek. We stopped off after about an hour on the truck at a market. It was there that I spotted this. I don't know how many fish were in this tub but there wasn't much room for anymore. The lady you can see at the top right was taking fish out, one at a time, and gutting them. About as fresh as you can get!

The first part of the trek consisted of an elephant ride, which was amusing, if a little slow. We did get to fed the elephants - they're hungry buggers. They didn't even give us a chance to peel the bananas for them!

After leaving the elephants, we had a 2 hour up-hill walk to the village we were going to be staying in for the night. Barry wasn't feeling the May-West (he'd been sick the night before) and to add to his woes his "The North Face" sandals, bought because they would be durable, broke. It was only a strap and we managed to make a DIY repair job but he wasn't pleased! Anyway, that evening, a number of local kids came and sand a few songs for us...at least I'm presuming it was a few. They never actually stopped singing for the ten minutes they were there! We all got the impression that they had done it so often that they had become completely bored with the whole thing.

Here's a picture of the crew the next morning after about one hour of walking. Left to right: Barry, Megan (Canada), Krista (Canada), Oscar (Italy), Fabien (Switzerland), Stefano (Italy) and Lee, our guide.

Here we are at the place we had lunch on the second day (Oscar took the picture).

The trekking on the secong day was the best. We had to follow a stream down the mountain so we were continually crossing over and back. It was relatively exerting but very enjoyable. Here I am (with my trusty bamboo stick - I now know why walkers use sticks: they're bloody handy) in front one of the waterfalls we passed on our journey down. After we stopped walking, we did a little white-water rafting (no much white-water unfortunately) and we completed our journey on a semi-submerged bamboo raft.

Chang Mai

Above is the reclining Buddha in Chang Mai. It's about 30 metres long and 5 metres high. Pretty impressive.

New Website

Hi all. As I've ran out of space for pictures on www.geocities.com/effinjames, I've had to change to this site.