Day 40 - 41 Sunday- Monday 19th October 2009

Stacey says

So we decided to head to Loas, which would be nice to see, but we don't have a whole lot of time to spend here, but it helps with our Thai visa extension as we only got 15 days coming in overland from Langkawi! Sunday we headed to Chaing khong at Midday, and arrived for 5pmish, and had dinner and drinks with 6 others that were on our bus, which was pretty cool. We headed to bed in prep for our early rise for the trip to Laos. Getting over to Laos took 5 minutes, a quick transfer across the water! Heading down to the little boat was a challenge with it raining, and it just being a muddy hill, carrying all our bags! Managed to not slide down the mud though! Passport control was the most disorganised and chaotic process ever. It was pouring with rain and passport control was all outdoors! People everywhere. Then we realised if we then took the slow boat along the Mekong River we wouldn't arrive to Luang Prubang until last Tuesday night, not leaving us much time to do anything, so we decided to take a bus instead, which only takes 10 hours. Arriving that day. However the first coach got tired, waited for another coach to come and continue the journey, then that coach had a puncture! So we ended up arriving at 6 in the morning into Luang Prubang!! (I wish I could say I never want to sit on another bus again ever, but we have to take a bus all the way down to Vientienne for 23rd!) However at 6 in the morning here, there is a 6am procession of the monks every day. We booked into our guesthouse, (we followed some Aussies who were on the bus and had been here before!) and then went to see what happens with the monks. Two local Lao woman put baskets of rice in our hands, then sat us on a mat on the floor, put fruit baskets around the mat, and we sat here waiting for the monks to walk past, to give them their gifts of rice and fruit! This was also in the pouring rain may I add!

Day 42 Tuesday 20th October 2009
Johno says
The monks stroll past us all seemed a bit too much for us to handle so we hit the sack for a lovely well earned sleep, we woke up and munched our way through lunch. Luang Prabang looks really nice by first impressions and a little more developed compared to the rural areas that we drove through for 18 hours… (it hurts just writing about it!!) we walked down the side of the Mekong River and saw the spot where the slow boats arrive (that we were meant to be on!) and some of what this small town had to offer…. After a bit of walk, the heat was so intense we decided to duck out of it again for another sleep with our best intentions to do some cycling around town in the later part of the afternoon!!! Yeah right, course we did (not!!) we ended snoozing until dark and woke up to find it was dinner time! However we did get down to the night markets later on in the evening which was good.