Today was a very early start and definitely worth the extra effort of getting up at 04:45. Many people in the hostel had put their name down to do this excursion which was run free of charge by Shampoo but unfortunately only Lisa and myself actually got up in time to do it as the others had been up quite late drinking.

Shampoo, Lisa and I headed out of the hostel on foot closely followed by Gnat Gnat (Shampoo's dog). We walked into the main street in the town centre where the local people were sitting by the side of the roads waiting for the orange-robed monks to come past collecting their food for the day. This was a daily occurrence as the monks were not allowed to prepare food for themselves, it had to be prepared by the local people and then given directly to the monk. If the local people did not have enough food to share with the monks, then the local people must feed themselves first and the monks went without food. If the monks collected too much food that day then they would give some of it back by handing it to some of the poorer children whose parents couldn’t afford to feed them, they knew that they could go to the temples and they would be fed by the monks.

There were about 30 temples in Luang Prabang and each temple would have a set route and time through the town making sure that each street was covered and each temple knew there would be people waiting for them with gifts of food (which consisted mainly of sticky rice). As there were so many temples in such a small town, there were almost 1,000 monks walking the streets every morning, which is why this is such an impressive sight to see.

You will see from my photos that the monks are carrying large bronze bowls. The reason for such big bowls is that the weight of these bowls is supposed to represent the pain that their mothers went through carrying them during the 9 months of pregnancy and to remind the monks of this pain every day. Also the monks are not allowed to touch any women and therefore they lift the lids to these bowls and the food is dropped in without touching the monk.

As I had plenty of time to spare today, I had also put my name down for a trip to the waterfalls nearby. The idea at the hostel was that you put your name on a white board if you wanted to do a trip and then others could see that you were going and put their name down also, thus having to split the cost of transport there and back between all of you, making it a little cheaper for all. When I got back to the hostel, Lisa and Tanya had also put their names down.

The three of us were picked up at 11am along with 4 other English people from another hotel in town and we were driven 32 km south from Luang Prabang to Tat Kuang Si, a beautiful spot featuring wide multi-tiered waterfalls and turquoise-green pools which you could swim in.

We skipped the first level as it was really busy as there were picnic tables and plenty of people here. Up on the second level it was completely deserted so we all went in for a dip. The water was perfectly clear and didn’t have those horrible fish in it that suck on to your feet like the waterfall in Thailand had. After cooling down in the pool we went off the explore the other levels. The next level that we went up to, I think we were not supposed to be in there, but it is where I had my picture taken. When we got up to the next level, it had a rope swing from the tree and was very busy so we decided to head on up to the very top of the waterfall and then check out some of the pools to see if they were quieter on the way back down.

It was quite a climb up to the top of the waterfall and looking back, I think we might have climbed up the wrong side as the way down was a lot better signed and also had a series of wooden steps, whereas this side was purely climbing up the side of the mountain in the mud using trees and tree roots to pull yourself up. Anyway, we made it to the top and it was a little disappointing as you couldn’t see all the way down to the bottom and the view over the other mountains was obscured by the trees in the jungle. At least we can say we did it.

Coming back down we went the correct way and stopped at the pool where the rope swing was. Here we bumped into the 4 others that were sharing our transport to and from town. Sami, did the rope swing and I got a few pictures of him using the high speed frame rate of my DSLR. I have only put one picture of him on here as I am sure you don’t want to see all 10!!!

Once we had all agreed to head back to town and our respective hotels, we returned to the car park where our tuk-tuk drive had been waiting for us for nearly 5 hours and we headed back.